Nextjs authentication

Question

I'm doing the first step into Nextjs and I'm stacked in defining the authentication part. I understand that Nextjs tipically rely on NextAuth for authentication. My first thogth was to enable provider like google but I don't understand how to avoid new user registration. The application I'm thinking need to have a login to protect routes but not the registration part. Basically I need to decide on my own who can access.

In realty I started working on an express backend that rely on session cookie and MongoDb (no jwt involved) but now I'm a bit confused on how to proceed.

Is there a way to avoid registering new user with providers? What is your suggestions?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Authentication in a Nextjs application is just like any another react application. Although NextAuth is great, but you don't have to rely on it if you don't want to.

Picture a Nextjs app like a basic react application. Same goes for authentication. Nothing specific to Nextjs in this one.

You can keep auth related data in cookies/headers and write a middleware, use it getServerSideProps call for all the pages you want to protect, to redirect the user to login page if the session has expired/or is invalid.

You can create custom integrations with identity platforms which would allow you to have an option to whether or not create an account for a user once you have received the data from the particular identity platform.