Have you tried to integrate JWT authentication into your Node.js application, but never found the right solution? Then you have come to the right place. In this post, we are going to walk you through the finer details of JWT authentication in Node.js using the npm package, jsonwebtoken.

If you are still not sure about what exactly JWT is and how it works, you can follow our previous post, before continuing with the implementation. As we discussed in the previous post ( A Brief Introduction to Securing Applications With JWT), we will be following the best practices of JWT authentication in this implementation. In case you want to refresh your memory on JWTs first, let’s go through which best practices we are going to be following in this tutorial.

• Send the JWT token in a cookie instead of the HTTP header
• Set a short expiration time for the token
• Use refresh tokens to re-issue access tokens that expire in a short time

There are two considerations I want to highlight before getting into the details:

• Writing your own implementation for authentication is not always the best solution. There are several third parties offerings that can handle all of it for you in a very secure manner.
• The code introduced in this tutorial is an implementation for a monolith application. If you want to use this code for a microservice you will have to use a combination of public/private keys to sign and verify the token.

Now that we have got the targets set, let’s start the implementation.

#nodejs #jwt #authentication