Spring Security Authentication with JWT

In this guide, we'll walk through how to implement JWT-based authentication in a Spring Boot application using Spring Security. The key features that we will cover are the following:

• Configuring Spring Security to use JWT tokens for authentication
• JWT token generation and validation
• Validating the JWT token in the request header
• Protecting endpoints with Spring Security annotations
• Handling access token expiration and refreshing tokens

We will be using Postgres as our database and Spring Data JPA for persistence of user information.

1. Add Dependencies

First, include the necessary dependencies in your pom.xml (if using Maven) or build.gradle (if using Gradle).

For Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.jsonwebtoken</groupId>
    <artifactId>jjwt</artifactId>
    <version>0.9.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>