I'm Jerry Wohlgemuth.

Google Apps Script is a really amazing way to extend Google's suite of productivity tools. It's even more enjoyable to work with now because of clasp. clasp makes it easy to check your code into git and gives you a bunch of tooling for deploying and manage your app. It also let's you write your code in Typescript! The autocompletion you get is a real boon to productivity because you no longer have to constantly read through the docs.

I've been working on a Google Sheets extension that calls out to the Stella Connect API and loads data into your current active sheet. To do this, I needed to create a JSON web token to authenticate. It's pretty easy to do this with the built in Apps Script Utilities class.

Here's an example that uses the HMAC256 algorithm to create the signature. You should be able change this snippet to use whichever algorithm your target API expects. This snippet also only sends the issued at claim, so you'll need to adapt that to your needs as well.

var base64Encode = function (str) {
  var encoded = Utilities.base64EncodeWebSafe(str);
  // Remove padding
  return encoded.replace(/=+$/, "");
};

var encodeJWT = function (secret) {
  var header = JSON.stringify({
    typ: "JWT",
    alg: "HS256",
  });
  var encodedHeader = base64Encode(header);
  var iat = new Date().getTime() / 1000;
  var payload = JSON.stringify({
    iat: iat,
  });
  var encodedPayload = base64Encode(payload);
  var toSign = [encodedHeader, encodedPayload].join(".");
  var signature = Utilities.computeHmacSha256Signature(toSign, secret);
  var encodedSignature = base64Encode(signature);
  console.log("Encoded Signature: " + encodedSignature);
  return [toSign, encodedSignature].join(".");
};