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JWT: Ultimate How-To Guide With Best Practices In JavaScript

JSON Web Token in Node.js from basics to code examples

Martin Novak
Better Programming
14 min readNov 24, 2021

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Original artwork by the author.

JSON Web Token (JWT) is a standard RFC 7519 for exchanging cryptographically signed JSON data. It is probably the most popular current standard of authorization on the web, especially when it comes to microservices and distributed architecture.

As a developer, when you are asked to implement a modern web application, you may need to break it down into independent services. Independent services and distributed architecture have many advantages. One thing that you will need to think about is how your services will know that users are allowed to use them.

Image credit: Author

With stateful session management, your solution would be to create a user session that is shared among all parts of the system. But with a growing distributed system, sharing a session can be quite challenging.

The alternative to stateful session management is passing a stateless JSON Web Token which will represent an access token or an identity token. It will hold claims that allow your services to authorize their users and it will use the magic of cryptography…

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Martin Novak
Martin Novak

Written by Martin Novak

Martin is a product manager at work, a software developer in his free time, and an entrepreneur at heart.

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