Why i can't attach authorization to header in apollo client? (Nestjs, Graphql, Apollo) - graphql

Question

I'm trying to bind frontend user registration and authorization to my Nestjs/Graphql server. The functionality of creation and authorization works, I create a user and put an access token in the cookie. But the problem is that I can't navigate through closed endpoints because Apollo doesn't allow me to attach the token to the request headers.
My server on backend (main.ts):
async function bootstrap() {
const app = await NestFactory.create(AppModule, { cors: true });
app.useGlobalPipes(new ValidationPipe())
app.useGlobalGuards(new JwtAuthGuard(new Reflector()))
app.enableCors({
origin: 'http://localhost:3000',
credentials: true,
allowedHeaders: 'Origin,X-Requested-With,Content-Type,Accept,Authorization,authorization'
})
await app.listen(3001);
}
bootstrap();
Graphql module in AppModule:
GraphQLModule.forRoot({
autoSchemaFile: join(process.cwd(), 'src/schema/gql'),
sortSchema: true,
driver: ApolloDriver
})
Apollo client on a frontend:
import { parseCookies } from 'nookies'
import { setContext } from '#apollo/client/link/context';
import { ApolloClient, InMemoryCache, createHttpLink } from '#apollo/client'
const cookies = parseCookies()
const httpLink = createHttpLink({
uri: 'http://localhost:3001/graphql'
});
const authLink = setContext((_, { headers }) => {
const token = cookies.access_token
return {
headers: {
...headers,
authorization: token ? `Bearer ${token}` : "",
}
}
});
export const client = new ApolloClient({
cache: new InMemoryCache(),
credentials: 'same-origin',
link: authLink.concat(httpLink)
})
My Rrequest Headers:
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,/;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: ru-RU,ru;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: access_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJlbWFpbCI6ImVxMUBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJzdWIiOjUsImlhdCI6MTY1NzM2NTI2OSwiZXhwIjoxNjU3MzY4ODY5fQ.AdbThqNQl746P-T653jkpvdKXTdrVOsj0SUsjzoTQDo
DNT: 1
Host: localhost:3000
Referer: http://localhost:3000/playlists
sec-ch-ua: ".Not/A)Brand";v="99", "Google Chrome";v="103", "Chromium";v="103"
sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0
sec-ch-ua-platform: "Windows"
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Answer 1

The reason why your setup doesn't work is probably because HttpOnly is set to true for your cookies and therefore aren't accessible through the JavaScript Document.cookie API. So your authLink doesn't have any effect. So, if you want to include it in the headers you either set HttpOnly to false, which is not preferred, or you store the token in LocaleStorage after authentication.
However as the cookies are set by your server, you can just make sure the cookies are send over to the server, by including credentials within your requests. The credentials however should be set within createHttpLink instead of ApolloClient.
But:
your graphql server is running at port 3001,
your frontend app is served through port 3000.
So credentials : same-origin won't include the headers, as different ports are different origins. Set credentials to include, instead of same-origin. On the server, the token can be accessed through the request.cookies instead of the http-headers. You don't need to parseCookies on the client side.