alexmacarthur/node-token-authentication

Code for the scotch.io tutorial: Authenticate a Node API Using JSON Web Tokens

Node Token Authentication

This repo uses JSON Web Tokens and the jsonwebtoken package to implement token based authentication on a simple Node.js API.

This is a starting point to demonstrate the method of authentication by verifying a token using Express route middleware.

Requirements

• node and npm

Usage

1. Clone the repo: git clone git@github.com:scotch-io/node-token-authentication
2. Install dependencies: npm install
3. Change SECRET in config.js
4. Add your own MongoDB database to config.js
5. Start the server: node server.js
6. Create sample user by visiting: http://localhost:8080/setup

Once everything is set up, we can begin to use our app by creating and verifying tokens.

Getting a Token

Send a POST request to http://localhost:8080/api/authenticate with test user parameters as x-www-form-urlencoded.

  {
    name: 'Nick Cerminara',
    password: 'password'
  }

Verifying a Token and Listing Users

Send a GET request to http://localhost:8080/api/users with a header parameter of x-access-token and the token.

You can also send the token as a URL parameter: http://localhost:8080/api/users?token=YOUR_TOKEN_HERE

Or you can send the token as a POST parameter of token.