Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Document an example of programatically generating asymmetric jwt signing keys

Open
#794 0 comments 3 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, node.js

Research direction

Start by reading the linked gist, which is the only concrete resource named in the issue. Locate the repository’s documentation entry point, since no file is specified, and document programmatic asymmetric JWT signing-key generation and rotation with guidance on key length and algorithms; done means the examples and best-practice guidance are available to developers.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

It would be good to document examples of generating asymmetric signing keys for jwts. The main reason is that you want developers to use best practices when generating such keys (secure key length, right algorithm etc, and these concepts can be foreign to us).

Currently there is one solid resource (a gist) documenting this: https://gist.github.com/ygotthilf/baa58da5c3dd1f69fae9
To quote ygotthilf/:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -m PEM -f jwtRS256.key
# Don't add passphrase
 openssl rsa -in jwtRS256.key -pubout -outform PEM -out jwtRS256.key.pub
cat jwtRS256.key
cat jwtRS256.key.pub

Documentation for doing this programatically, say as part of a key rotation is even more sparse.

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
18.2k
Forks
1.3k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from auth0/node-jsonwebtoken

All issues in auth0/node-jsonwebtoken

Similar issues

More JavaScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.