Question

I want to automatically generate user accounts by generating a random username and password, and then the user is logged in automatically (the user doesn’t know his username/password, his browser just stores the session cookie).

Passport functions as middleware, so how can I authenticate the user I just generated? Or, would it be better to somehow redirect to my app.post('/login') route and send those variables? (But somehow sending those to the browser, just to be sent back to the server doesn’t seem very secure or efficient).

app.get('/signup', function(req, res) {
if(req.isAuthenticated()) { res.redirect('/'); }
else {
    var today = new Date();
    var weekDate = new Date();
    weekDate.setDate(today.getDate() + 7);

    var key1 = Math.random().toString();
    var key2 = Math.random().toString();
    var hash1 = crypto.createHmac('sha1', key1).update(today.valueOf().toString()).digest('hex');
    var hash2 = crypto.createHmac('sha1', key2).update(weekDate.valueOf().toString()).digest('hex');

    var newUser = new models.User({
        username: hash1,
        password: hash2,
        signupDate: today,
        accountStatus: 0,
        expirationDate: weekDate,
    });

    newUser.save(function(err) {
        if(err) {}
        console.log("New user created.");

        //HOW CAN I PASS USERNAME AND PASSWORD ARGUMENTS???
        passport.authenticate('local')();
        res.redirect('/login');
    })
}
});

Answer 1

Replace your call to passport.authenticate('local')(); with

req.logIn(user, function(err) {
  if (err) { return next(err); }
  //copied from the docs, you might want to send the user somewhere else ;)
  return res.redirect('/users/' + user.username); 
});

and let me know how that goes.