auth0-react-node-ts

This is a minimal example of authenticated communication between a React app and a node.js API using Auth0.

👉 Full-stack Demo 👈

(The demo connects to an api hosted on Replit).

Workshop

The Quick Start below will get you up and running quickly but for a deep dive we recommend working through the official Auth0 React Workshop.

Quick Start

1. Fork this repo and open it up in an editor. Run yarn to install dependencies.

2. Visit Auth0 and set up a free account. Click + Create Application set the Application type to SPA set the application name to auth0-react-node-ts. Find the fields Allowed Callback URLs and Allowed Web Origins and set both to:

http://localhost:3000, https://add_production_url_here_once_deployed.com

3. You will see that Auth0 has provided you with a Domain and a Client ID. Inside your app open /.env.example and set the Domain and Client ID. Rename the file .env (remove the .example extension).

4. Next, we need an API to connect to. Visit the demo API hosted on Replit and fork the project. Inside your new forked Replit project, click on 'Secrets' and add the following.

key: AUTH0_DOMAIN
value: <your Auth0 Domain>

5. Finally we need to connect the app to the API. Open your .env file and set REACT_APP_API_URL to point at your forked Replit URL (it will look something like https://auth0-react-node-ts-api--your_username.repl.co).

That's it, the app and the API can now communicate securely. Start your Replit API and run yarn start in your app to start the demo.

What's happening here?

This is a high level flow diagram of how the app, the API and the authentication server work together to allow secure communication using tokens.

Questions and Issues

Can I use this in my other projects

Keep in mind this is just the simplest example of a token being consumed by an API. There is no sign up flow, no database at all, we are not remembering our users or dealing with permissions. For a more complete solution check the Official Auth0 React Workshop repo.

I want the user to stay logged in when they refresh the page

Look at the Auth0 docs section on Sessions.

My app doesn't work when it's deployed

You have deployed your app to Netlify or Vercel but it throws an error when it tries to fetch the token? This is because you haven't told Auth0 where your application is deployed. Login to edit your Auth0 application settings. In the Quick Start we set Allowed Callback URLs and Allowed Web Origins to be:

http://localhost:3000, https://add_production_url_here_once_deployed.com

Edit these to replace https://add_production_url_here_once_deployed.com with the URL of your deployed app (aka https://myapp.netlify.com).