The Headaches of Authentication x The Joys of Next-Auth

Authentication can be a daunting topic. Arguably the most important aspect of an application and something you certainly don't want to get wrong. I have seen many implementations of Authentication out in the wild. Some are rock solid, some are held up by toothpicks. But one solution I have to share my thoughts on is Next-Auth.

I am a lazy developer, I will automate anything I can even if it takes so much longer than manually doing so. So, naturally, I love seeing tools I can use to bootstrap aspects of my projects. NextJS wins a top place on this list of tools as it takes so much config out of a frontend framework and just gets you building nice and quick. Next-Auth does exactly this but for auth.

I have implemented Next-auth on this site with Google as an OAuth provider. Go ahead and try signing in with Google. This took a grand total of 10 minutes to put together and although it does nothing but say you are signed in as your email address. It is the foundation blocks to building things like commenting and accounts.

Cheers! Jacob