Perhaps I was unclear. What I meant to say is that, whenever possible, we shouldn’t have multiple versions of a field, especially when there is no corresponding plaintext password field in the database, as is the case here.

I appreciate the security concerns, but I wouldn’t consider overriding the password property with the hashed password to be wrong. Raw passwords are typically only needed in three places: user creation, login, and password reset. I’d argue that having both password and hashedPassword properties in the user object may actually lead to confusion, since user objects are normally used in hundreds of places throughout the codebase. I think, when applicable, we should consider balancing security with code maintainability by avoiding redundancy and potential confusion.

Thanks for the tip. password.trim() can indeed be problematic. I just removed that line.

Seriously, why the negative tone? If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry. You might think that I’m wasting time, but there are multiple ways to skin a cat. I prefer not to use DEB packages for deployment, though others might.

Author here. In case it’s not clear, this article isn’t about installing Linux packages; it’s about deploying multiple versions of software to development and production environments.