What is the proper way to test routes secured with jwt token? - node.js

Question

While the following test passes I feel I'm doing this wrong. Am I expected to log in every time i need to test a secure route? I've tried passing global vars around after i get the initial token but passing vars i'm finding extremely counter intuitive. Passing variables in a before() call presents me same issue as passing / accessing global vars inside nested promises.
describe('Users', function(done) {
var testToken = 'my-test-token'
it('logs in', function(done) { // <= Pass in done callback
var rT = 'tttttt'
chai.request(urlroot)
.post('/login')
.type('form')
.send({ email: 'test_user_1#this.com', password: '9999' })
.end(function(err, res) {
expect(res).to.have.status(200);
expect(res.body.token).to.be.a('string');
done()
});
});
it('gets all users', function(done) { // <= Pass in done callback
// console.log(urlroot + '/users');
chai.request(urlroot)
.post('/login')
.type('form')
.send({ email: 'test_user_1#this.com', password: '9999' })
.end(function(err, res) {
chai.request(urlapi)
.get('/users?secret_token='+res.body.token)
.end(function(err, res){
console.log('data', res.body);
// expect(res.body).to.be.json()
})
});
});
});

Answer 1

What I do is use before() method to call my authenticate service to get the token in the same way that the aplication would, and store into a variable.
Something like:
var token = "";
before(async () => {
//Get token
token = "Bearer " + await getToken();
});
Then, in every test you want to use the credentials use .set()
it('...', function (done) {
chai
.request(url)
.set("Authorization", token) //Call .set() before .get()
.get("/users")
//...
})