Authenticating the users in React
As with the other aspects of security, authentication in React is a huge topic and is beyond the scope of this book. In this section, I will give you just a very basic mechanism that enables us to have a simple authentication flow on the client side. Everything will revolve around the JWT and the way we decide to handle it. In this chapter, we are going to store it just in memory.
The internet and the specialized literature are full of debates on what is the optimal solution for storing authentication data – in our case, the JWT token. As always, there are pros and cons to each solution and at the beginning of this section.
Cookies have been around for a very long time – they can store data in key-value pairs in the browser and they are readable both from the browser and the server. Their popularity coincided with the classic server-side rendered websites. However, they can store a very limited amount of data, and the structure...
