Building RESTful Web Services with PHP 7

Authentication and middleware

We have already discussed several times that for a RESTful web service, a session is maintained through an authentication token stored on the client side. So, the server can look for the authentication token and can find that user's session stored on the server.

There are several ways to generate a token. In our case, we will use JWT (JSON Web Tokens). As told on jwt.io:

JSON Web Tokens are an open, industry standard RFC 7519 method for representing claims securely between two parties.

We will not go into complete detail about JWT as JWT is a way to transfer information between two parties (in our case, client and server) as JWT can be used for many purposes. Instead, we will use it for access/authentication ...