Lesson 8: JWT Basics

Lesson page

Tutorial video from 5:05:30 to 6:28:35.

Students are presented with two extra assignments:

1. Create a new Express app with JWT auth from scratch (from written instructions)
2. Following along with the video exactly

If students do the “preferred” assignment (#1), they will put it in 05-JWT-Basics/preferred. Otherwise, their work will be in 05-JWT-Basics/starter.

If students do the preferred assignment, compare their work to the written instructions; expect to spend more focus on the code review.

If students do the starter assignment, you can copy and paste their work into the final directory, and then view the resultant diff to get a narrower focus on what, if anything, they changed compared to what the instructor demonstrated.

For the most part, the starter folder for this assignment (and likely the students preferred folder as well) will follow the same general structure as the last few weeks. There will be a main app.js Express entrypoint, controllers, routes middleware, and error directories.

The main thing to look out for this week is whether the students have a good understanding of:

• What is a JSON Web Token
• Why / when is it used in web development
• How to sign and verify a token
• Correctly using the authorization HTTP header
• Storing the JWT secret in the env variables
• Using auth middleware to pass along the decoded user details to the controllers