JSON Web Token (JWT) is a low overhead option for authentication that is easy to implement and scales with your application. There is no need to store session data as everything you need is stored in an encoded string sent in the JWT, significantly reducing database overhead for your servers.

In this course, we will build a simple authentication server that will act as a token issuer, and we will use those tokens to access resources on an API.  Starting from scratch, you will learn how easy token based authentication can be and will understand how to use them on your APIs as well as on the front end of your web applications.

In this course, we will build a simple authentication server that will act as a token issuer, and we will use those tokens to access resources on an API. Starting from scratch, the participants will learn how easy token based authentication can be and will understand how to use them on their APIs as well as on the front end of their web applications.

Course Overview: JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication with Node.js

In this lesson, we build a very simple Express server.  This server will have a single route that displays the current date and time and a handler for 404 pages.


Setup a Web Server in Node.js using Express

In this lesson we learn how to use environment variables to set the port of an express.

Set the Server Port in Express Using Environment Variables

In this lesson, we see how to handle POST requests on our server and we extract the data that was passed in the body of the requests using body-parser.

Add a POST Route To Express And Parse the Body

In this lesson, we will build a token issuer that will return a JSON Web Token.  This simple server will have a single endpoint for login that queries a list of users and returns a web token for the matching user.


Provide Users With A JSON Web Token

In this quick lesson, we see how to add the CORS middleware so that our Express server can handle requests from different origins.


Allow CORS in Node.js and Express

In this lesson, we build a simple API with two endpoints, one public and one secure.  Using JWT and validating with the signature, we ensure that the user is authorized and has access to a protected resource before serving it.

Authenticate Users With JWT for Access to Protected Resources

In this lesson, we add the login form to a single page application and we pass our tokens to the API.  Should the token be valid, we will have access to the data from the secure endpoint in the API.


Connect a Front-End to a Secure API using JWTs

In this lesson, we take the previous API and front-end and we convert them to use Auth0 to replace our custom authentication server built in the previous lessons. 



JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication with Node.js and Auth0

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