Token-Based Authentication with JWT
5 min read
Module Overview
What You’ll Learn
- Explain how JWT authentication differs from session-based authentication
- Sign and verify a JSON Web Token
- Protect an API route using a token instead of a session
💡 Why this matters: Sessions (Module 2) need server-side storage and work naturally with cookies in a browser. A JWT needs neither, the standard choice for REST APIs consumed by mobile apps, single-page apps, or other services, this module covers it directly.
What’s Covered
- What a JWT is, its three parts, and what “stateless” actually means in practice.
- Signing and verifying tokens, with the jsonwebtoken library.
- Issuing a token at login, replacing a session with a signed token.
- Protecting routes with a token, middleware that verifies a token instead of checking a session.
Hands-On
By the end of this module, you’ll have a login endpoint issuing a real JWT, and protected routes that verify it, no server-side session storage required.
Next module: authorization, restricting specific routes to specific roles, on top of the authentication built so far.