Creating a JSON web token

To secure your REST API or a service endpoint, you have to write a handler in Go that generates a JSON web token, or JWT.

In this recipe, we will be using https://github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go to generate JWT , although you can implement any library from a number of third-party libraries available in Go, such as https://github.com/square/go-jose and https://github.com/tarent/loginsrv.

How to do it…

1. Install the 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/dgrijalva/jwt-go
$ go get github.com/gorilla/handlers
$ go get github.com/gorilla/mux

2. Create create-jwt.go, where we will define the getToken handler that generates JWT, as follows:

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