I encountered an issue where expired JWT tokens weren’t returning a 401 Unauthorized status in my PHP application. After debugging, I found the problem in my JWT middleware.
Issue
When sending expired tokens to the API:
-
The DecodeJwt() function failed
-
The middleware silently ignored this failure
-
No 401 status was returned
-
The request continued processing
Solution
I modified the middleware to properly handle JWT validation errors:
try {
$jwt = DecodeJwt($token);
// Process valid token...
} catch (\Throwable $e) {
// Handle expired/invalid token
$response = ResponseFactory()->createResponse();
$responseBody = [
"success" => false,
"error" => $e->getMessage(),
"status" => "unauthorized",
"timestamp" => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')
];
$response->getBody()->write(json_encode($responseBody));
return $response->withStatus(401)->withHeader('Content-Type', 'application/json');
}
This fixed the issue, and now expired tokens properly return 401 errors.
Has anyone else encountered this problem or found a more elegant solution?