react-express-session-auth

This app is an oversimplified example of the Node/React authentication workflow using express-session and has 2 main files in it:

• server.js - server part of the app (using Express) - 23 lines of code
• src/index.js - React part of the app (using create-react-app) - 10 lines of code

Authentication has a few steps:

1. user should click login button to trigger credentials sending (username/password) to the server /api/login endpoint using POST method (in this app even credentials are not sent, just an api call is being made)
2. server endpoint /api/login being reached triggers user data saving to a server session (using express-session) AND send success response back to client with success message in response body (for example just OK text) and session cookies (note the connect.sid on the screenshot below)

all of things in a section 2 are implemented using the following lines of code:

app.post('/api/login', function (req, res, next) {
    req.session.user = "test";
    res.send("ok")
});

3. after being authenticated client can send POST requests and receive information that was not allowed before (in this example app it is just word "test") but in a real app that could be dashboard data or user profile info

To Run The App Locally

following steps should be done:

• npm i to install all dependencies
• npm run server to start Nodejs server
• npm start to run the React app

After that the blank page should appear in the browser on port 5000 with only 1 button so far: Login that could be used for authentication