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joepie91 / sessions.md
Last active April 13, 2024 03:38
Introduction to sessions

While a lot of Node.js guides recommend using JWT as an alternative to session cookies (sometimes even mistakenly calling it "more secure than cookies"), this is a terrible idea. JWTs are absolutely not a secure way to deal with user authentication/sessions, and this article goes into more detail about that.

Secure user authentication requires the use of session cookies.

Cookies are small key/value pairs that are usually sent by a server, and stored on the client (often a browser). The client then sends this key/value pair back with every request, in a HTTP header. This way, unique clients can be identified between requests, and client-side settings can be stored and used by the server.

Session cookies are cookies containing a unique session ID that is generated by the server. This session ID is used by the server to identify the client whenever it makes a request, and to associate session data with that request.

*S

@joepie91
joepie91 / express-server-side-rendering.md
Last active February 20, 2024 20:52
Rendering pages server-side with Express (and Pug)

Terminology

  • View: Also called a "template", a file that contains markup (like HTML) and optionally additional instructions on how to generate snippets of HTML, such as text interpolation, loops, conditionals, includes, and so on.
  • View engine: Also called a "template library" or "templater", ie. a library that implements view functionality, and potentially also a custom language for specifying it (like Pug does).
  • HTML templater: A template library that's designed specifically for generating HTML. It understands document structure and thus can provide useful advanced tools like mixins, as well as more secure output escaping (since it can determine the right escaping approach from the context in which a value is used), but it also means that the templater is not useful for anything other than HTML.
  • String-based templater: A template library that implements templating logic, but that has no understanding of the content it is generating - it simply concatenates together strings, potenti
@joepie91
joepie91 / promises-faq.md
Last active June 25, 2023 09:02
The Promises FAQ - addressing the most common questions and misconceptions about Promises.