In a follow up to his previous post about sharing authentication information between socket.io and PHP, Gonzalo Ayuso has posted an updated method using JSON Web Tokens instead.

I’ve written a previous post about Sharing authentication between socket.io and a PHP frontend but after publish the post a colleague (hi @mariotux) told me that I can use JSON Web Tokens (jwt) to do this. I had never used jwt before so I decided to study a little bit.

JWT are pretty straightforward. You only need to create the token and send it to the client. You don’t need to store this token within a database. Client can decode and validate it on its own.

He updates the code from the previous post, showing how to replace the HTTP basic authentication with the JWT functionality. He makes use of some simple JWT library handling to encode/decode the claims when the token is made a part of the request.