JWT Authentication: Access Tokens, Refresh Tokens, Cookies, and Authorization

This is my first-ever technical article, and I wanted to start with something I’ve been learning and implementing in my backend projects: JWT authentication. When we build a web application, we need a way for the server to know whether a request is coming from an authenticated user. There are different ways to solve this problem. Two common approaches are stateful authentication and stateless authentication. In this article, we’ll understand both approaches and then dive deeper into JWTs, access tokens, refresh tokens, cookies, and how the frontend and backend communicate during authentication.