Get Access Tokens

To get an access token, you need to request one when authenticating a user. Auth0 makes it easy for your app to authenticate users using:

Quickstarts: The easiest way to implement authentication, which can show you how to use Universal Login, the Lock widget, and Auth0's language and framework-specific SDKs. Our Lock documentation and Auth0.js documentation provide specifics about retrieving an ID token after authentication.
Authentication API: If you prefer to roll your own, you can call our API directly. First, you need to know which flow to use before following the appropriate flow tutorial.

When a user authenticates, you request an Access Token and include the target audience and scope of access in your request. This access is both requested by the application and granted by the user during authentication using the /authorize endpoint.

You may configure your tenant to always include a default audience.

Token Use	Format	Requested Audience	Requested Scope
/userinfo endpoint	Opaque	tenant name (`YOUR_DOMAIN`), no value for `audience` parameter, no `audience` parameter passed	`openid`
Auth0 Management API	JWT	Management API v2 identifier (`https://{tenant}.auth0.com/api/v2/`)
Your own custom API	JWT	The API Identifier for your custom API registered in the Auth0 Dashboard

In only one specific instance, Access Tokens can have multiple target audiences. This requires that your custom API's signing algorithm is set to RS256. See Token Best Practices for details.

If you specify an audience of your custom API identifier and a scope of openid, then the resulting access token's aud claim will be an array rather than a string, and the access token will be valid for both your custom API and for the /userinfo endpoint. Other than in the use case of a single custom API as well as Auth0's /userinfo endpoint, your access tokens will be unable to have two or more audiences.

Custom domains and the Management API

Auth0 issues tokens with an issuer (iss) claim of whichever domain you used when requesting the token. Custom domain users may use either their custom domain or their Auth0 domain.

For example, you may have a custom domain of https://login.northwind.com. If you request an access token from https://login.northwind.com/authorize, your token's iss claim will be https://login.northwind.com/. However, if you request an access token from https://northwind.auth0.com/authorize, your token's iss claim will be https://northwind.auth0.com/.

For an access token with the target audience of the Management API, if you have requested an access token from your custom domain, then you must call the Management API from your custom domain or else your access token will be considered invalid.

By default, an access token for a custom API is valid for 86400 seconds (24 hours). If there are security concerns, you can shorten the time period before the token expires.

After an access token has expired, you may want to renew your access token. To renew the access token, you can either re-authenticate the user using Auth0 or use a refresh token.

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