Trying to understand how and where 'audience' is used

[gabe1]

I’m using auth0 with a React Native app and am using some copied code which is working. I’m trying to understand what audience means and how it is used. The docs say the audience identifies the resource owner, and in my code it’s set to 'http://localhost:". This is a loopback, so I’m assuming that when auth0 actually uses audience, it calls it relative to the resource server.
Can anyone explain what’s happening here? How does auth0 identify the machine relative to which it calls audience, and is the audience always the same as this machine?

[James.Morrison]

Hello there @gabe1, welcome to the Auth0 Community! I believe @sgmeyer said it best when he spoke about audience here below:

@sgmeyer

we use the audience parameter to make a determination which resource server the user is authorizing access to. By default auth0 issues that opaque token which has limited use on some of our API endpoints. We also issues that opaque access_token when specifying the /userinfo endpoint as the audience.

In our implementation we require you to specify an audience for some resource server. This indicates to Auth0 that we are using an OIDC flow and the audience of that token will be for the specified resource server. Many libraries often include a way to specify audience or other custom parameters natively via a property or in this case via extra parameters .

So when you said the statement of:

@gabe1

so I’m assuming that when auth0 actually uses audience , it calls it relative to the resource server.

This is 100% correct!

Please let me know if you have any additional questions on this front as I am happy to help! Thanks!