Using JWT authentication with Express and Angular

Managing authentication state via a session cookie is a valid strategy, but an increasingly common approach is to use a compact JSON Web Token or JWT to manage authentication state between the back-end and frontend layers of our web application. We can store our user information inside a JWT so that the client can restore its authenticated state upon reload.

Getting ready

To use JWT in our application, we will need to install a library both in our Express web server and in our Angular application. For our web server, we will use jwt-express, a very handy and easy-to-use JWT library for Express. We will use this library to create our JWT, as well as refresh it automatically...