---

title: jwt-auth keywords:

• Apache APISIX
• API Gateway
• Plugin
• JWT Auth
• jwt-auth description: This document contains information about the Apache APISIX jwt-auth Plugin.

---

Description

The jwt-auth Plugin is used to add JWT authentication to a Service or a Route.

A Consumer of the service then needs to provide a key through a query string, a request header or a cookie to verify its request.

Attributes

For Consumer:

Name	Type	Required	Default	Valid values	Description
key	string	True			Unique key for a Consumer.
secret	string	False			The encryption key. If unspecified, auto generated in the background. This field supports saving the value in Secret Manager using the APISIX Secret resource.
public_key	string	True if RS256 or ES256 is set for the algorithm attribute.			RSA or ECDSA public key. This field supports saving the value in Secret Manager using the APISIX Secret resource.
algorithm	string	False	“HS256”	[“HS256”, “HS512”, “RS256”, “ES256”]	Encryption algorithm.
exp	integer	False	86400	[1,...]	Expiry time of the token in seconds.
base64_secret	boolean	False	false		Set to true if the secret is base64 encoded.
lifetime_grace_period	integer	False	0	[0,...]	Define the leeway in seconds to account for clock skew between the server that generated the jwt and the server validating it. Value should be zero (0) or a positive integer.

NOTE: encrypt_fields = {"secret"} is also defined in the schema, which means that the field will be stored encrypted in etcd. See encrypted storage fields.

For Route:

Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
header	string	False	authorization	The header to get the token from.
query	string	False	jwt	The query string to get the token from. Lower priority than header.
cookie	string	False	jwt	The cookie to get the token from. Lower priority than query.
hide_credentials	boolean	False	false	Set to true will not pass the authorization request of header\query\cookie to the Upstream.

You can implement jwt-auth with HashiCorp Vault to store and fetch secrets and RSA keys pairs from its encrypted KV engine using the APISIX Secret resource.

Enable Plugin

To enable the Plugin, you have to create a Consumer object with the JWT token and configure your Route to use JWT authentication.

First, you can create a Consumer object through the Admin API:

:::note You can fetch the admin_key from config.yaml and save to an environment variable with the following command:

admin_key=$(yq '.deployment.admin.admin_key[0].key' conf/config.yaml | sed 's/"//g')

:::

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/consumers -H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "username": "jack",
    "plugins": {
        "jwt-auth": {
            "key": "user-key",
            "secret": "my-secret-key"
        }
    }
}'

:::note

The jwt-auth Plugin uses the HS256 algorithm by default. To use the RS256 algorithm, you can configure the public key and specify the algorithm:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/consumers -H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "username": "kerouac",
    "plugins": {
        "jwt-auth": {
            "key": "user-key",
            "public_key": "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\n……\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----",
            "algorithm": "RS256"
        }
    }
}'

:::

Once you have created a Consumer object, you can configure a Route to authenticate requests:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes/1 -H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "methods": ["GET"],
    "uri": "/index.html",
    "plugins": {
        "jwt-auth": {}
    },
    "upstream": {
        "type": "roundrobin",
        "nodes": {
            "127.0.0.1:1980": 1
        }
    }
}'

Example usage

You need first to issue a JWT token using some tool such as JWT.io's debugger or a programming language.

:::note

When you are issuing a JWT token, you have to update the payload with key matching the credential key you would like to use; and exp or nbf in UNIX timestamp.

e.g. payload={"key": "user-key", "exp": 1727274983}

:::

You can now use this token while making requests:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9080/index.html -H 'Authorization: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJrZXkiOiJ1c2VyLWtleSIsImV4cCI6MTU2NDA1MDgxMX0.Us8zh_4VjJXF-TmR5f8cif8mBU7SuefPlpxhH0jbPVI' -i

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 13175
...
Accept-Ranges: bytes

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="cn">
...

Without the token, you will receive an error:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
...
{"message":"Missing JWT token in request"}

You can also pass the token as query parameters:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9080/index.html?jwt=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJrZXkiOiJ1c2VyLWtleSIsImV4cCI6MTU2NDA1MDgxMX0.Us8zh_4VjJXF-TmR5f8cif8mBU7SuefPlpxhH0jbPVI -i

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 13175
...
Accept-Ranges: bytes

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="cn">
...

And also as cookies:

curl http://127.0.0.1:9080/index.html --cookie jwt=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJrZXkiOiJ1c2VyLWtleSIsImV4cCI6MTU2NDA1MDgxMX0.Us8zh_4VjJXF-TmR5f8cif8mBU7SuefPlpxhH0jbPVI -i

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 13175
...
Accept-Ranges: bytes

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="cn">
...

Delete Plugin

To remove the jwt-auth Plugin, you can delete the corresponding JSON configuration from the Plugin configuration. APISIX will automatically reload and you do not have to restart for this to take effect.

curl http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes/1 -H "X-API-KEY: $admin_key" -X PUT -d '
{
    "methods": ["GET"],
    "uri": "/index.html",
    "id": 1,
    "plugins": {},
    "upstream": {
        "type": "roundrobin",
        "nodes": {
            "127.0.0.1:1980": 1
        }
    }
}'