JWT Authentication With Refresh Tokens

Last Updated : 05 Jan, 2024

When building a web application, authentication is one of the important aspects, and we usually implement authentication using JWT tokens (You can learn more about JWT here). We create an access token and store it in the local storage or session or cookie. But there is a more secure way to implement this using Refresh Tokens.

Refresh Tokens:

It is a unique token that is used to obtain additional access tokens. This allows you to have short-lived access tokens without having to collect credentials every time one expires.

Access tokens, with brief validity, carry user details, while refresh tokens, stored as HTTP-only cookies, enable prolonged re-authentication without exposing sensitive information to client-side JavaScript.

Auth Persistence:

We can easily persist users between refreshes and login without any credentials. We can create a new route called refresh, whenever a token expires or a user refreshes we can get a new access token by sending a request to this route

Steps to Installation the express module:

Step 1: Run the following commands to initialize the project and create an index file & env file. (Make sure you have node and npm installed)

npm init -y

Step 2: Installing required packages

npm install express cookie-parser dotenv jsonwebtoken

Project Structure:

Project Structure

The updated dependencies in package.json file will look like:

"dependencies": {
    "cookie-parser": "^1.4.6",
    "dotenv": "^16.3.1",
    "express": "^4.18.2",
    "jsonwebtoken": "^9.0.2",
}

Explanation: In `index.js`, authentication logic involves creating an Express app with login and refresh routes. The login route validates credentials, responding with a refresh token and access token on a successful match, while the refresh route verifies the token for a new access token or raises an authorization error.

Example: We will now implement two routes login & refresh. The below code is for index.js:

javascript

const dotenv = require('dotenv');
const express = require('express');
const cookieparser = require('cookie-parser');
const jwt = require('jsonwebtoken')
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
 
// Configuring dotenv
dotenv.config();
const app = express();
 
// Setting up middlewares to parse request body and cookies
app.use(express.json());
app.use(express.urlencoded({ extended: false }));
app.use(cookieparser());
 
const userCredentials = {
    username: 'admin',
    password: 'admin123',
    email: 'admin@gmail.com'
}
 
app.post('/login', (req, res) => {
    // Destructuring username & password from body
    const { username, password } = req.body;
 
    // Checking if credentials match
    if (username === userCredentials.username &&
        password === userCredentials.password) {
 
        //creating a access token
        const accessToken = jwt.sign({
            username: userCredentials.username,
            email: userCredentials.email
        }, process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET, {
            expiresIn: '10m'
        });
        // Creating refresh token not that expiry of refresh 
        //token is greater than the access token
 
        const refreshToken = jwt.sign({
            username: userCredentials.username,
        }, process.env.REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET, { expiresIn: '1d' });
 
        // Assigning refresh token in http-only cookie 
        res.cookie('jwt', refreshToken, {
            httpOnly: true,
            sameSite: 'None', secure: true,
            maxAge: 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000
        });
        return res.json({ accessToken });
    }
    else {
        // Return unauthorized error if credentials don't match
        return res.status(406).json({
            message: 'Invalid credentials'
        });
    }
})
 
app.post('/refresh', (req, res) => {
    if (req.cookies?.jwt) {
 
        // Destructuring refreshToken from cookie
        const refreshToken = req.cookies.jwt;
 
        // Verifying refresh token
        jwt.verify(refreshToken, process.env.REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET,
            (err, decoded) => {
                if (err) {
 
                    // Wrong Refesh Token
                    return res.status(406).json({ message: 'Unauthorized' });
                }
                else {
                    // Correct token we send a new access token
                    const accessToken = jwt.sign({
                        username: userCredentials.username,
                        email: userCredentials.email
                    }, process.env.ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET, {
                        expiresIn: '10m'
                    });
                    return res.json({ accessToken });
                }
            })
    } else {
        return res.status(406).json({ message: 'Unauthorized' });
    }
})
 
app.get('/', ((req, res) => {
    res.send("Server");
    console.log("server running");
}))
 
app.listen(8000, () => {
    console.log(`Server active on http://localhost:${8000}!`);
})

.env: The below code is for .env which is used to store your sensitive credentials like API keys:

PORT = 8000
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=MYSECRETACCESS
REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET=MYREFRESHTOKENSECRET

Output:

Output

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JWT Authentication With Refresh Tokens

Refresh Tokens:

Auth Persistence:

Steps to Installation the express module:

javascript

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