The Ultimate Guide to User Authentication: How to Securely Connect Your Frontend to a Django REST API with Simple JWT
Securing an API is one of the most critical and confusing steps in full-stack development. I know this because I’ve been there—staring at my frontend wondering why it wasn’t talking to the backend. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how I finally figured out how to securely authenticate users between a React frontend and a Django REST API using Simple JWT. Whether you're building a new web app or fixing a broken login flow, I’ve been in your shoes. I’ll walk you through everything—from why we don’t use sessions in this context to setting up secure endpoints using JSON Web Tokens (JWT). By the end of this guide, you’ll have a solid, secure foundation for handling user authentication in your own project. 🔐 Why Not Sessions? When I first started with Django, I used sessions and cookies because that’s what Django recommends out of the box. But things got tricky once I started building frontend apps with React. Sessions require server-side storage and rely heavily on cookies, wh...