jQuery Password Strength Meter for Twitter Bootstrap

The jQuery Password Strength Meter is a plugin for Twitter Bootstrap that provides rulesets for visualy displaying the quality of a users typed in password.

Dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses. You can choose the one that suits your purposes better.

npm entry

Requirements

• jQuery 1.7 or higher
• Bootstrap 2 or 3

Not using Bootstrap?

This plugin currently relies heavily on Bootstrap and it is not possible to use it with another framework without making big changes in the code or forgetting completely about the UI feedback.

Forks to use it with another frameworks that I know of:

• Zurb Foundation fork by edtownend

How to use it

Just invoke the plugin on the password fields you want to attach a strength meter to. For example, to use it on all the password fields with the default examples:

    $(':password').pwstrength();

To apply it only to one input and change the options:

    $('#passwd1').pwstrength({
        ui: { showVerdictsInsideProgressBar: true }
    });

Options

Click here to find the complete list of options for the plugin.

Methods

Once the plugin has been initialized, it is possible to interact with it through the methods.

Force an update

It is possible to force an update on a password strength meter. It will force a new score calculation and an update of the UI elements, the onKeyUp callback will be called.

$("#passwdfield").pwstrength("forceUpdate");

Remove the strength meter

This will remove the data associated to the meter, and the UI elements.

$("#passwdfield").pwstrength("destroy");

Adding Custom Rules

The plugin comes with the functionality to easily define your own custom rules. The format is as follows:

$("#passwdfield").pwstrength("addRule", "ruleName", function (options, word, score) {}, rule_score, rule_enabled);

Example:

$("#passwdfield").pwstrength("addRule", "testRule", function (options, word, score) {
    return word.match(/[a-z].[0-9]/) && score;
}, 10, true);

Change the score associated to a rule

It is possible to change the score given by a rule. It works like this:

$("#passwdfield").pwstrength("changeScore", "wordSequences", -100);

That would penalize even more the presence of sequences in the password.

Activate and deactivate rules

It is also possible to activate or deactivate rules. It as simple as:

$("#passwdfield").pwstrength("ruleActive", "wordSequences", false);

That would avoid looking for sequences in the password being tested.

Callback Functions

The plugin provides two callback functions, onLoad and onKeyUp. You can use them like this:

$(document).ready(function () {
    var options = {};
    options.common = {
        onLoad: function () {
            $('#messages').text('Start typing password');
        },
        onKeyUp: function (evt, data) {
            $("#length-help-text").text("Current length: " + $(evt.target).val().length + " and score: " + data.score);
        }
    };
    $(':password').pwstrength(options);
});

Extra security

The plugin comes with two validation rules deactivated by default. One checks for too many character repetitions, and the other checks the number of character classes used. An easy way to increase the security of the passwords is to activate this two rules:

$(document).ready(function () {
    var options = {};
    options.rules = {
        activated: {
            wordTwoCharacterClasses: true,
            wordRepetitions: true
        }
    };
    $(':password').pwstrength(options);
});

Examples

There are some examples in the examples directory. Just serve them with any webserver and check them in your browser. Make sure you serve the examples directory as the site root. For example:

cd examples
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

And go to localhost:8000.

Alternatively, you can check-out the examples in a hosted demo.

Build and Test

The build and testing processes rely on Grunt. To use them you need to have node.js and grunt-cli installed on your system. Assuming you have node.js in your Linux system, you'll need to do something like this:

sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

Now you have the grunt command line utility installed globally.

Bundle and minified

To generate the bundle and the minified file you only need to execute this in the project directory:

npm install -d
grunt

It will check the source files, and build a minified version with its corresponding source map. The generated files will be available in the dist directory.

Testing

To run the tests the only thing you need to do is execute this in the project directory:

npm install -d
grunt test

It will check all the source files with JSLint and run the tests, which are written with Jasmine. You'll find the tests source code in the spec directory.

Travis is being used for continuos integration. You can check there if the tests are passing.