JSON Web Tokens with Express

Just a small example on how to implement JSON Web Token signing and verification with an Express server.

Useful for routes where you require a user to be authorized to access the content.

Demo

I currently have setup a functional demo to try out requesting a token, and to use the token for access to a route.

You can only access it through CURL, or requests made in something like Postman or Insomnia. I guess you could use your browser to modify requests — Firefox Dev is good with this.

Endpoints

These are formatted for curl, but you are able to import directly into Postman.

Token Retrieval

curl -X POST
  https://api.cgutwin.ca/jsonwebtoken/v1/auth
  -H 'Accept: */*'
  -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache'
  -H 'Connection: keep-alive'
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json'
  -H 'Host: api.cgutwin.ca'
  -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate'
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache'
  -H 'content-length: 62'
  -d '{
    "username": "a_username",
    "password": "a_password"
}'

Protected Route Access

Take the JWT you received in the request above, and paste it in this request.

curl -X GET
  https://api.cgutwin.ca/jsonwebtoken/v1/protected
  -H 'Accept: */*'
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer <JSON_WEB_TOKEN>'
  -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache'
  -H 'Connection: keep-alive'
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json'
  -H 'Host: api.cgutwin.ca'
  -H 'accept-encoding: gzip, deflate'
  -H 'cache-control: no-cache'

Source Setup

Clone the repository and pnpm install (or npm i or yarn).

index.js and the routes are located in /lib, but you can run directly with pnpm run start.

Environment

These are the environment variables the server looks for:

NODE_ENV=development
PORT=10000
JWT_SECRET='secret'
SSL_ROOT='config/ssl'
SSL_CERT_NAME='localhost-cert.pem'
SSL_KEY_NAME='localhost-privkey.pem'

Create a .env file in the root, change the secret, and configure paths to your localhost SSL configuration. I put copies of my SSL cert and key in a config/ssl folder for easy access, but you can put an absolute path as the root.