What are the good practices to Node.js web app authentication and authorization?

#node #react #graphql #discuss

Hey everyone!

I'm doing a small project to learn myself a new technologies and I started to implementing the app auth stuff and I wonder if you can share the best practices for that.

To narrow down what I'm doing is the simple web app with Node.js + GraphQL with Apollo Client + Mongo as database + React as a client. Also, I'm thinking about JWT tokens and email + password for Sign_up and Sign_in.

What I'm looking is how better to store the tokens, in browser in database? When to check them? What process of generating token and expiration practices? etc.

Would love to hear anything you have!

Top comments (4)

Dmitrii Pashutskii • Nov 17 '19 • Edited

I've also used Reddit to discuss this topic and I just copy one answer which I found really helpful and maybe it'll be useful for someone else:

The way I usually do it looks something like this:

Client sends a login request with a username/password

Server validates the credentials and creates a JWT with a payload that includes the user's id.

Server sets the JWT as an httponly cookie on the response

Client sends request for protected resource

Server checks if the auth token cookie is set and is a valid JWT.

If the JWT is valid, the server continues the request. Otherwise, it responds with a 401 status.

Usually the JWT middleware will provide the parsed JWT payload (the user's id) to downstream middleware/handlers.

There's a bunch of details that could change. For example, you could send the JWT to the client and store it in memory then attach it to every request using the Authorization header. The payload can also change. If you want to more session data on the server, you might have a session table and just store { sessionId: ... } in the JWT. There are even some use-cases where you store additional data in the JWT (you can really put any data in there), but the data could become stale if it changes after you issue the token to the client. I'd shoot for putting as little data in the token as possible. Ideally data that won't change.

You likely won't need to store the JWT in your database. The only reason I can see for storing them is to allow you to invalidate them (though if you're just storing a session id in the JWT, you could just delete the session).

Kudos to this gentleman: reddit.com/r/node/comments/dx2g93/...

Souk Syp. • Nov 26 '19

Use Redis for session storage.

Ridae HAMDANI • Nov 16 '19

I think the best solution is to store the token in the localStorage of the browser if you want to keep the user logged in ,otherwise use session storage.
Then send the token with every API request and check the validation of the token in every endpoint that needs authentication or authorisation ( create a middleware for that and add it to routes ).
You can check that repository I create a time ago