Authenticating node API with passport-jwt

Question

I\'m trying to setup JWT authentication using passport-jwt. I think I\'ve taken the right steps, but a test GET won\'t succeed and I don\'t know how to debug it.

He

Answer 1

For any poor soul that follows me here: the passport-jwt doc implies that the auth header should look like this...

Authorization: JWT JSON_WEB_TOKEN_STRING.....

That turned out to be misleading (for me, anyway).

Fortunately, thanks to this article I was able to learn how the token is built. (The token's prefix up to the first '.' is the base64 encoding of the scheme. That "JWT " at the front was noise that prevented the validation from working.

So the fix was to change the token returned by the user controller from:

    res.send({ user: user, jwtToken: "JWT " + token });

To the simpler:

    res.send({ user: user, jwtToken: token });

Phew. Is it me, or is it really a bummer how inadequately these things are explained in so many node package docs??