README.md

How To Mock JSON Web Tokens

As the title suggests, this is an example of how to mock JSON Web Tokens for unit testing a Node.js Express application. It assumes you're using Auth0 but the mocking strategy applies more broadly to JSON Web Tokens in general.

I've also written a companion article for this repo.

Setup

$ npm install

Running The App

From the root of the repository...

$ npm start

The app runs by default on port 4000.

Running Tests

This is probably what you care about most... Seeing that the test is able to hit an auth'd endpoint.

$ npm test

Tests run against a server running on port 4001. The tests will setup and tear down the server automatically so no need to make sure the server is running before the tests run.

Generating Your Own Key Set

If you'd like to use your own key set as an experiment you'll need to...

1. Generate an RSA key.
2. Retrieve the n and e values for that key.
3. Base64urlUInt encode your n and e values
4. Replace the values for each in test/fixtures.js

I used Python 3 for all the key stuff because it's easy.

Generating An RSA Key

Simple as this:

$ python3
>>> from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA
>>> key = RSA.generate(2048)

To save your key to a file:

>>> f = open('mykey.pem','wb')
>>> f.write(key.exportKey('PEM'))
>>> f.close()

The private key saved in mykey.pem can be copy/pasted over top of this key.

Retrieving n and e Values For The Key

To get these important values, from a python repl, simply do:

>>> key.n
...
>>> key.e
...

Base64urlUInt Encoding

This requires the pyjwkest module. From the command line:

pip install pyjwkest

Then from a Python repl:

>>> from jwkest import long_to_base64
>>> long_to_base64(<your-n-value>)
...
>>> long_to_base64(<your-e-value>)
...

The output is the strings to replace your n and e values here.