gotrue VS dex

If you’ve been following us from the start, you will know that Supabase Auth started by forking Netlify’s GoTrue server. A lot has changed since then and we’ve diverged from the upstream repository. At this stage it makes sense to rename the project to something else (cues drumroll) — Auth.

I am testing gotrue netlift module https://github.com/netlify/gotrue

I guess since it's a deviation of it

To answer point 1: Maybe to start out, but in the long run, having only social logins may cause your app to lose a segment of the market (I don't know how much). If you're fine with that, then by all means only support social logins.

However, I strongly suggest having it (or some way for someone not to use a social provider) if you want to have as many users a possible.

Personally, I don't have a google account, I'm wary to use my Apple account for non-Apple sites, and I don't have facebook, instagram, new gen z hotness app, etc... And I can confidently say I am not alone in choosing to use apps which don't require a social login.

At the end of the day though, password auth isn't a non-trivial problem. It is a solved problem of which there are numerous articles/papers and many libraries for most languages/frameworks. For example, the Phoenix framework for Elixir has a built in command which scaffolds auth, and it works really well (I have used it in a personal project): https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/mix_phx_gen_auth.html. For JS, you can use something like passport: https://www.passportjs.org/packages/passport-local/. If you want a separate service entirely (even though it would be more complex to have a separate service to start out), there is GoTrue: https://github.com/netlify/gotrue. These are just a few suggestions of tech I have come across. There is so much more out there, I encourage you to research options to see what may be a best fit.

If you're worried about password auth, maybe give one time passwords a try. They don't require any password reset flow, and are generally secure when implemented correctly. As an example, I don't have a password for my craigslist account. Every time I want to login, I can choose to get a magic link/otp which gets exchanged for a session. In practice (and this is my personal opinion), I prefer magic links. They are one time, hard to guess (again dependent on implementation), can be time limited, and most likely won't be intercepted in transit (though it could be in a rare circumstance).

To answer point 2: yes.

If your app is to order things (I use things in a general term) it sounds like eCommerce. And if you're in eCommerce, you better have a way for a user to track what they have ordered and how much they have paid for it at a minimum. Otherwise, your site may come across as a scam, even though it uses Stripe. Sketchy sites can use Stripe to get your money (albeit, it'll be a one time payment).

In conclusion, auth for your application seems crucial. Email/password auth is still relevant for applications. While not necessary for an MVP, there is a segment of the market you will lose if you don't have an email/password option, or even an email/OTP/magic link option (I don't know how much, really going off an educated guess).

Best of wishes in building your app! I genuinely hope it is successful and safe for people to leverage :)

Use a self-hostable auth microservice like gotrue or authelia, ORY's suite of products, etc.

Any examples for implementation like https://github.com/netlify/gotrue for Actix-web?

Dex: https://dexidp.io

Recently I looked into having a relatively simple SSO setup for my homelab. My main objective is that I could easily login with Google or GitHub auth. At my previous job I used both JetBrains Hub [1] and Keycloak but I found both of them a bit of a PITA to setup.

JetBrains Hub was really, really easy to get going. As was my previous experience with them. The only thing that annoyed me was the lack of a latest tag on their Docker registry. Don't get me wrong, pinned versions are great, but for my personal use I mostly just want to update all my Docker containers in one go.

On the other hand I found Keycloak very cumbersome to get going. It was pretty easy in dev mode, but I stumbled to get it going in production. AFAIK it had something to do with the wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that I tried to use. But after a couple of hours, I just gave up.

I finally went with Dex [2]. I had previously put it off because of the lack of documentation, but in the end it was extremely easy to setup. It just required some basic YAML, a SQLite database and a (sub)domain. I combined Dex with the excellent OAuth2 Proxy and a custom Nginx (Proxy Manager) template for an easy two line SSO configuration on all of my internal services.

In addition to this setup, I also added Cloudflare Access and WAF outside of my home to add some security. I only want to add some CrowdSec to get a little more insights.

1. https://www.jetbrains.com/hub/

2. https://dexidp.io/

3. https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

3. https://github.com/alex3305/unraid-docker-templates

Another great option is to use https://github.com/dexidp/dex in an authentication setup. In your app, you federate the authentication to dex using OAuth2. Dex then has a pluggable architecture with built-in connectors for many established identity providers using a variety of protocols: Among others OAuth2, SAML 2 but also GitHub, Google, Gitea and so forth.

dex is well-known: https://github.com/dexidp/dex

We used keycloak for openid identity provider as well. It is fine to setup keycloak once. But it is painful share the setup with other engineers.

For local development, we end up using dex (https://dexidp.io). When we need support group/role, we use dex and glauth(https://glauth.github.io). Both dex and glauth can be configured with yaml files. We just created a few yaml files and a docker compose file, every engineer can be brought up the whole environment in a few seconds.

Also https://www.authelia.com and https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik look pretty promising, if you need more advanced features from them.

I added it as an available option (flake) in Dex: https://github.com/dexidp/dex