Securing a RESTful service using a JSON web token

Once we have a REST API endpoint and a JWT token generator handler in hand, we can easily secure our endpoints with the JWT, which we will be covering in this recipe.

How to do it…

1. Install the github.com/auth0/go-jwt-middleware, github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go, github.com/gorilla/mux, and github.com/gorilla/handlers packages using the go get command, as follows:

$ go get github.com/auth0/go-jwt-middleware
$ go get github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go
$ go get github.com/gorilla/handlers
$ go get github.com/gorilla/mux

2. Create http-rest-api-secured.go, where we will define the JWT middleware to check for JWTs on HTTP requests, and wrap the /employees route with it, as follows:

package main
import 
(
  "encoding/json"
  "log"
  "net/http"
  "os"
  "time"
  jwtmiddleware "github.com/auth0/go-jwt-middleware"
  jwt "github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go"
  "github.com/gorilla/handlers"
  "github.com/gorilla/mux"
)
const 
(
  CONN_HOST = "localhost"
  CONN_PORT = "8080"
 ...