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.

Here's what I've done:

1. setup passport-jwt straight out of the doc as much as possible

   var jwtOptions = {
       secretOrKey: 'secret',
       issuer: "accounts.examplesoft.com",  // wasn't sure what this was, so i left as defaulted in the doc
       audience: "yoursite.net"   // wasn't sure what this was, so i left as defaulted in the doc
     };
   
   jwtOptions.jwtFromRequest = ExtractJwt.fromAuthHeader();
   
   passport.use(new JwtStrategy(jwtOptions, function(jwt_payload, done) {
     User.findOne({id: jwt_payload.sub}, function(err, user) {
       if (err) {
           return done(err, false);
       }
       if (user) {
           done(null, user);
       } else {
           done(null, false);
           // or you could create a new account
       }
     });
   }));
   

2. Added a token result to my user /login endpoint

   var jwt = require('jsonwebtoken');
   // ...
   
   exports.postLogin = function(req, res, next) {
     passport.authenticate('local', function(err, user, info) {
       if (err) throw err;
       if (!user) {
           return res.send({ msg: 'Login incorrect' });
       }
       req.logIn(user, function(err) {
           if (err) throw err;
           var secretOrKey = jwtOptions.secretOrKey;
           var token = jwt.sign(user, secretOrKey, {
               expiresIn: 631139040 // 20 years in seconds
           });
           res.send({ user: user, jwtToken: "JWT " + token });
       });
     })(req, res, next);
   };
   

Things were looking good up to here. I can login a user (using passport local auth) and the response was a I hoped...

{ "user": { "_id": "56c8b5bd80d16ef41ec705dd", "email": "[email protected]", "password": "$2a$10$zd ... etc.", "__v": 0, }, "jwtToken": "JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJ .... etc." }

I created an unprotected test route like this...

// in my routes file
app.get('/user/tokenTest', user.tokenTest);

And in my controller, a simple endpoint...

exports.tokenTest = function(req, res) {
    console.log(req.headers);
    res.send("token test!!");
};

And GET-ing that works fine, too.

3. But then I try to protect that route like this:

   app.get('/user/tokenTest', passport.authenticate('jwt', { session: false }),
       user.tokenTest);
   

After I do that, nothing but sadness. I send a request like this:

curl -k 'https://localhost:3443/user/tokenTest' -H 'Authorization: JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJ... etc.' 

And always, always get a 401:

Unauthorized

Console logs in the controller don't seem to execute, neither does logging in the passport.use strategy method. I've tweaked and tweaked, but I'm a little lost. The passport-jwt doc just supplies the example, and virtually no other help.

Please, any ideas about either a mistake that I'm making above, or at least how to go about debugging??

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??