JWT VS Devise Token Auth

To authenticate our users, we need to add jwt gem to our Gemfile

jwt is a Ruby implementation of the RFC 7519 OAuth JSON Web Token standard. bcrypt is a Ruby binding for the OpenBSD bcrypt() password hashing algorithm.

ruby-jwt is fairly easy to use on it's own without Devise. You might try that first and only add Devise if needed.

Generally speaking, the larger the application, the more internal and external services it has to talk to. External services usually have their own way of authenticating and authorizing third party API calls. With internal systems however, organisations prefer to use JWT tokens because of their inherent flexibility and versatility. A sample JWT based handshake between 2 rails applications using ruby-jwt would look like this -

Interesting. What's the difference between this and the standard ruby-jwt? https://github.com/jwt/ruby-jwt

jwt - encoding and decoding jwt oauth

Decoding JWTs is simple whit the help of an already implemented solution. In this section, I'll be using the ruby-jwt.

I have a React single page application using React Router that hooks into a Rails 5 API. The Rails application uses devise_token_auth for authentication. I've successfully created an authentication process that stores the user state in a Redux store on the client side.

Did you send an authorization header with your api call? The error is pretty clear — the request is unauthorized. Devise is expecting session cookies, but your api should use tokens. https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth

I mentioned Identity in my first comment. I've never found it as simple as Devise though - especially in an API only setting.

With Devise there's a third-party Gem you can use called devise_token_auth which deals with everything automatically.

https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth

redux-token-auth is a great library. What it mainly does is it provides a plug and play auth implementation functionality for ruby on rails based APIs which implement popular devise_token_auth for auth handling.

have you looked at https://github.com/waiting-for-dev/devise-jwt or https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth

I'd prefer to have a standalone rails API and a react client separately, but that's not mandatory. I discovered a gem called devise_token_auth and it didn't seem to have refresh tokens but it refreshed the tokens on every request anyway so I was pretty happy with it.

As a side note, also check out devise_token_auth here