Authentication in Golang with JWTs

This application will show you how to build and secure a mock voting application. You'll create an API with Go and a frontend with React that will consume your API. You'll secure your API using Auth0 so that only authenticated users can access and vote on products.

🚀 Read the full tutorial here:

Authentication in Golang with JWTs

Technology

This demo uses:

• Go v1.14
• React v16.13
• Auth0

Make sure you have Go installed before running the demo.

Running the demo

Clone and get dependencies

• Clone the repo with git clone https://github.com/auth0-blog/go-react-vr-auth
• Switch to the directory that holds the repo cd go-react-vr-auth
• Run go get to grab the dependencies

Auth0 Setup

If you do not have an Auth0 account, sign up for one now.

• Navigate to the Auth0 management dashboard and click on Create Application. Name your application anything you'd like, select "Single Page Web Applications", and click Create.
• Click on Settings and fill in Allowed Callback URLs, Allowed Logout URLs, and Allowed Web Origins with http://localhost:3000 and then press Save changes.
• Back in your code, create a new file to store some of these variables:

touch static/src/auth_config.json

Then fill it in with:

{
  "domain": "YOUR_DOMAIN",
  "clientId": "YOUR_CLIENT_ID"
}

Update this with your own credentials. You can find them in your Auth0 dashboard application page that you just created.

• Now set up the Go API with Auth0. In the dashboard, click on APIs in the sidebar and then click Create API.
• Give it any name you'd like. For identifier, this can be anything, but for naming conventions we recommend a URL format (doesn't have to be a real URL). Leave Signing Algorithm as is and click Create.
• Update your main.go file with the required values from the Auth0 dashboard. There are 3 different spots that need to be updated:

// main.go
// ...
aud := "YOUR_API_IDENTIFIER"
// ...
iss := "https://YOUR_DOMAIN/"
// ...  
resp, err := http.Get("https://YOUR_DOMAIN/.well-known/jwks.json")
// ...

Your Identifier is listed on the Settings tab of the API you just created in the dashboard. To find YOUR_DOMAIN, click on the Quick Start tab and scroll down to the code snippet. Copy the value for options.Authority and use that to replace YOUR_DOMAIN. Make sure you keep the trailing slash for iss in main.go.

Run React

• Open a new terminal tab and switch to the React directory and then pull in the required dependencies

cd static
npm install

• Start your React application

npm start

Run Go

• In a separate terminal tab, grab the dependencies

go get

• Build and run your Go application:

go run .

💥 Navigate to http://localhost:3000 to see it in action! 💥