Authentication in Golang with JWTs

This application will show you how to build and secure a mock voting application. You'll create an API with Go and a frontend with React that will consume your API. You'll secure your API using Auth0 so that only authenticated users can access and vote on products.

🚀 Read the full tutorial here:

Technology

This demo uses:

Make sure you have Go installed before running the demo.

Running the demo

Clone and get dependencies

Clone the repo with git clone https://github.com/auth0-blog/go-react-vr-auth
Switch to the directory that holds the repo cd go-react-vr-auth
Run go get to grab the dependencies

Auth0 Setup

If you do not have an Auth0 account, sign up for one now.

Navigate to the Auth0 management dashboard and click on Create Application. Name your application anything you'd like, select "Single Page Web Applications", and click Create.
Click on Settings and fill in Allowed Callback URLs, Allowed Logout URLs, and Allowed Web Origins with http://localhost:3000 and then press Save changes.
Back in your code, create a new file to store some of these variables:

touch static/src/auth_config.json

Then fill it in with:

{
  "domain": "YOUR_DOMAIN",
  "clientId": "YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
}

Update this with your own credentials. You can find them in your Auth0 dashboard application page that you just created.

Now set up the Go API with Auth0. In the dashboard, click on APIs in the sidebar and then click Create API.
Give it any name you'd like. For identifier, this can be anything, but for naming conventions we recommend a URL format (doesn't have to be a real URL). Leave Signing Algorithm as is and click Create.
Update your main.go file with the required values from the Auth0 dashboard. There are 3 different spots that need to be updated:

// main.go
// ...
aud := "YOUR_API_IDENTIFIER"
// ...
iss := "https://YOUR_DOMAIN/"
// ...  
resp, err := http.Get("https://YOUR_DOMAIN/.well-known/jwks.json")
// ...

Your Identifier is listed on the Settings tab of the API you just created in the dashboard. To find YOUR_DOMAIN, click on the Quick Start tab and scroll down to the code snippet. Copy the value for options.Authority and use that to replace YOUR_DOMAIN. Make sure you keep the trailing slash for iss in main.go.

Run React

Open a new terminal tab and switch to the React directory and then pull in the required dependencies

cd static
npm install

Start your React application

npm start

Run Go

In a separate terminal tab, grab the dependencies

go get

Build and run your Go application:

go run .

💥 Navigate to http://localhost:3000 to see it in action! 💥

mxfeinberg/go-react-vr

Authentication in Golang with JWTs

Technology

Running the demo