Many modern APIs, in particular those concerned with authentication and authorization, generate JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for their clients to use.

JWTs must be cryptographically signed in order to be valid, which means they cannot be simply be generated using ordinary templating primitives. Signing can be via one of a number of algorithms, but by far the two most common are HS256 (shared secret) and RS256 (public/private key).

In order to enable creation of valid JWTs WireMock Cloud provides a pair of template helpers specifically for this purpose: jwt and jwks.

Both HS256 and RS256 signed tokens are supported.

If you’d like to see these features in action, take a look at the OAuth2 mock hosted by WireMock Cloud, which is also available to use as an template when creating your own mock API.

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Generating a token

You can generate a token in a stub response by enabling templating and simply adding the following to the respobse body:

{{{jwt maxAge='12 days'}}}

This will select defaults for all the required values, set a 100 year expiry term and sign the token using HS256 (shared secret).

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Expiry date

You can customise expiry term either by setting the maxAge parameter e.g.

{{{jwt maxAge='12 days'}}}

or by setting an absolute expiry date e.g.

{{{jwt exp=(parseDate '2040-02-23T21:22:23Z')}}}

You can similarly set the nbf (not before) date:

{{{jwt nbf=(parseDate '2018-02-23T21:22:23Z')}}}

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Standard claims

Standard claims can be set as follows.

Issuer:

{{{jwt iss='https://jwt-example.wiremockapi.cloud/'}}}

Audience:

{{{jwt aud='https://jwt-target.wiremockapi.cloud/'}}}

Subject:

{{{jwt sub='jonsmith'}}}

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Custom claims

You can also set any custom claim you wish via named parameters e.g.

{{{jwt
    isAdmin=true
    quota=23
    score=0.96
    email='jonsmith@example.wiremockapi.cloud'
    signupDate=(parseDate '2017-01-02T03:04:05Z')
}}}

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Signing with RS256

By setting the alg parameter, the token can be signed using the public/private key algorithm:

{{{jwt alg='RS256'}}}

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Retrieving keys

For clients to be able to validate JWTs, they need to be able to retrieve either the shared secret or the public key, depending on the signing algorithm.

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Getting all keys for your mock API

The keys used to sign tokens for a particular mock API can be retrieved via the settings admin API resource. To fetch these via curl, you can do the following:

curl -H 'Authorization:Token <your WireMock Cloud API token>' https://your-mock-api.wiremockapi.cloud/__admin/settings

This will return a JSON document like this, from which you can retrieve the any of the keys:

{
  "settings": {
    "extended": {
      "jwt": {
        "hs256Secret": "...",
        "rs256PublicKeyId": "...",
        "rs256PublicKey": "-----BEGIN RSA PUBLIC KEY-----\n...\n-----END RSA PUBLIC KEY-----\n",
        "rs256PrivateKey": "-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n...\n-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----\n"
      }
    }
  }
}

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The JSON Web Key Set (JWKS)

When using RS256 (public/private key) signing, it is common for clients to fetch the public key for verification via a JSON Web Key Set (JWKS) endpoint. You serve a JWKS from your mock API simply by adding a stub containing the following response body (with templating enabled):

{{{jwks}}}
JSON And JSONPathMiscellaneous Helpers