Authentication and Session Management
Implement two production authentication patterns on top of your API — server-side sessions and stateless JWTs — and understand the security tradeoffs of each, including secure cookie configuration.
Prerequisites: REST API Fundamentals with Node.js; Database Schema Design; Redis running locally for session storage.
Targeted versions: bcrypt (or argon2) for password hashing; express-session + connect-redis; jsonwebtoken; verified against current package documentation, mid-2026.
You'll add real user accounts to your API, hash passwords correctly, and implement both of the two dominant auth patterns — server-side sessions and stateless JWTs — so you understand what each one actually buys you instead of just copying whichever snippet you found first.
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