react-native-auth0 VS Pundit

Welcome, fellow developers! Today I want to present you a step-by-step technique on how to test Auth0’s custom actions and databases in Javascript. For those of you who don’t know Auth0, it’s an identity management platform that you can connect to your existing or new applications, and configure it to easily provide authentication and authorization mechanisms. It’s one of the easiest solutions for IAM nowadays.

For example, you can rely on the powerful OAuth by Okta to handle your Auth services, Flutterwave payment gateway to accept payment, and Google Firebase Messaging to manage notifications.

For the third, examples here might be analytics plugins in specialized databases like Clickhouse, data-transformations in places like your ETL pipeline using Airflow or Fivetran, or special integrations in your authentication workflow with Auth0 hooks and rules.

Authentication providers like Auth0 and Okta have become commonplace in software development. These providers help take this work off of your plate, and this can be made even easier by using a reverse proxy that provides authentication capabilities, like oauth2-proxy.

Ideally, I would recommend not handling and storing passwords yourself. It is preferable to use an identity provider (IdP), such as Azure AD B2C, Auth0, or FusionAuth. These systems are designed to manage your users' identity (including their passwords) so you don't have to. You could also use Single Sign-On with cloud providers.

Authentication, authorization, access control, and any other synonymous name you can think to call it, is not always a walk in the park. Through the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW) and web applications, there have been various solutions to help make authentication a breeze. There have been, third-party services like Auth0 that you can easily integrate with your apps without having to worry much about authentication and doing it right, or worry about security because these third-party services cover all of that. There have also been standards, and specifications like OAuth and OpenID Connect (OIDC) which have evolved over the years. Some libraries and SDKs enable developers to easily integrate with these services, standards and specifications without worrying much about low-level implementation details. The only need-to-know is a subset of the SDK’s APIs needed to meet the application requirements. NextAuth.js is one of these libraries!

Auth0 is a cloud service that provides a turn-key solution for authentication, authorization and user management. It is a feature-rich service that is highly customizable and can be used in a variety of ways. Auth0 is a great choice for a wide range of applications, from simple web apps to enterprise applications. It provides a great way to add authentication and authorization to your application without having to build it yourself, and has various integrations with services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This along with its passwordless authentication and multi-factor authentication makes it a great choice for a wide range of applications.

When using Auth0 with Next.js, securing all routes except for specific ones, such as the homepage or login page, can be achieved without the need to add extra logic for each route in the middleware. This can be accomplished by using a simple yet powerful regular expression (regex).

Auth0 (provider) Auth0 has been around for some time and is probably the most popular authN provider out there. While authN is their main offering (they give you SDKs for authentication + they store user profiles and let you manage them through their SaaS), they also allow you to define authZ to some degree, via RBAC and policies.

#6 Auth0

https://github.com/varvet/pundit Popular open-source Ruby library focused around the notion of policies, giving you the freedom to implement your own approach based on that.

Can you expand a little? Here's some technical background on what we're doing:

We have our own database of every version of every rubygems package alongside its runtime dependencies (like you see at https://rubygems.org/gems/pundit).

Then we parse your Gemfile and Gemfile.lock. We use the Gemfile to figure out gem group and pinned requirements (we run turn your Gemfile into a ruby AST since Gemfiles can be arbitrary ruby code; we use bundler's APIs to parse your Gemfile.lock). This gives us all of the dependencies your rely on.

Then we let you choose one or more package that you want to upgrade and the version you want to target (let's say Rails 7.0.4.3).

Now we have [your dependencies and their current versions], [target rails version], [all of the runtime dependency constraints of these gems]. We run this through a dependency resolution algorithm (pubgrub). If it resolves then you're good to upgrade to that version of Rails without changing anything.

If this fails to resolve, it's because one or more of your current dependencies has a runtime restriction on rails (or another indirect gem being pulled in by the new rails version). This is where the optimization part comes in. The problem becomes "what is the optimal set of versions of all your dependencies that would resolve with the next version of Rails". Currently we solve for this set trying to optimize for the fewest upgrades. As our dataset of breaking changes gets better we'll change that to optimizing for the "lowest effort".

Happy to elaborate.

For authorization, I'm going back and forth with Pundit and CanCanCan

Expressing authorization rules can be a bit challenging with the use of other authorization gems, such as pundit or cancancan. The resource_policy gem provides a more concise and expressive policy definition that uses a simple block-based syntax that makes it easy to understand and write authorization rules for each attribute.

As an example of how to default to deny, consider a Ruby on Rails app (as we tend to do). The primary way a user interacts with the app is through API endpoints powered by controllers. We use Pundit, a popular authorization library for Rails, to manage user permissions.

https://github.com/varvet/pundit Popular open-source Ruby library focused around the notion of policies, giving you the freedom to implement your own approach based on that.

PS If you do mobile / web work (or something else with "detached" UI), I find that declarative access control rules are far superior to imperative ones, because they can be serialized and shipped over the wire. For example, backend running cancancan can be easily send the same rules to casl on the frontend, while if you used something like pundit to secure your backend, you either end up re-implementing it in the frontend, or sending ton of "canEdit" flags with every record.

You can use a combination of an authorization gem (https://github.com/varvet/pundit) and decorators (https://www.rubyguides.com/2018/04/decorator-pattern-in-ruby/) if you want to extend functionality based on their roles.

Use Action Policy or Pundit, and write tests for your policies. Authz is worth testing with near complete coverage.