JWT server to server communication in Node.js

About

This repository is the source code for the JWT server to server communication in Node.js tutorial series on Youtube on YouTube provided by productioncoder.com.

Please help this repo with a ⭐️ if you find it useful! 😁

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2 How to run this application

2.1 Install dependencies

Install the dependencies by running

npm install

2.2 HMAC communication

To initiate an HMAC server to server communication, you need to spin up two server so they can talk to each other

We recommend opening two terminal windows for this. In the first terminal run

npm run serverA

In the second terminal window run:

npm run serverB

You now have two servers running on port 3000 and on port 8080.

2.3. RSA-based server to server communication

Make sure that you create two RSA keypairs and paste it in the root directory with the following file names

serverA-private.key
serverA-public.key
serverB-private.key
serverB-public.key

If you do not want to generate an RSA keypair with openssl via the command line, you can use an online service like jsencrypt if you just want to try out the project locally.

2.4. Let the servers talk to each other

To let one server send a message to the other server, you can hit the following unprotected REST endpoint with curl or with Postman:

POST localhost:8080/produce

Note that both servers support the POST /produce endpoint. Therfore, you can also hit

POST localhost:3000/produce

Both servers will not print log messages that indicate that they just exchanged information with JWT tokens in the header.

3 Security

To make this communcation truly secure, we would need to make use of a secure transport protocol such as https.

Since this is a tutorial and we did not want to complicate it further by using self-signed certificates, we just use http for the sake of simplicity.

We do this, so the tutorial is easier to understand. In a _production scenario you need to use a secure protocol such as https / TLS to ensure a secure communication.