ASP.NET Core offers a simplified hosting model, called minimal APIs, that allows us to build lightweight APIs with minimal dependencies. However, “minimal” doesn’t mean minimal security. Minimal APIs need authentication too.
We’ve explored JWT authentication in an earlier post here. In this article we’ll examine how we can build a basic authentication handler for minimal APIs in ASP.NET Core. Below we’ll implement a basic authentication handler that will identify and authenticate the user. Because we will validate the user’s identity using credentials stored in a database, we will make use of Entity Framework Core.
