jsonwebtoken error troubleshoot: Uncaught Error: error:0909006C:PEM routines:get_name: no start line

jsonwebtoken error

Description

If you encounter error below:

Uncaught Error: error:0909006C:PEM routines:get_name:no start line

Reason

Bad format private key value. In the jsonwebtoken node package, the sign() function.

Example,

  jsonwebtoken.sign(PAYLOAD, PRIVATE_KEY, OPTIONS)

the PRIVATE_KEY value above must be string, and sometimes this string can be mistakenly "JSON.stringify()". Even though the end result is still a string, but JSON.stringify encoding turns the string into JSON string format, and it's not a value we want to provide to the sign() function.

Below is example error code

ERR_OSSL_PEM_NO_START_LINE

//error from node_modules/jsonwebtoken/sign.js

{
  library: 'PEM routines',
  function: 'get_name',
  reason: 'no start line',
  code: 'ERR_OSSL_PEM_NO_START_LINE'
}