Auth.js Authentication for the Web
I’ll hijack to ask a question that’s been on my mind…<p>I’ve heard people say “don’t write your own auth” but I’ve also spent a LOT of time hacking auth libraries to fit custom designs, custom flows, etc. And building tooling to integrate libraries with other infra: middleware, test mocks, etc.<p>My question is this: If you have a full time dev team maintaining an application, is it really that much slower in the long term to maintain your own auth flow?<p>I’ve basically given up on UI frameworks like Material UI because of this issue… if you’re building something customized, and you have full time devs to support it, the “time savings” of using a library like that is, in my opinion, a scam.<p>You feel like you’re getting a lot for free because the stuff that works out of the box is very visible. But the months and months of cumulative time spent dealing with the complexity that comes from customization and extension is invisible, because it’s just bugs you fix, or tasks that take a week instead of a day.<p>My team lost probably a dev month this quarter to react-select because of this. I’ve seen the same happen with Popper, react-table, and dozens of other supposedly helpful libraries.<p>I’m curious what other folks think about auth specifically though. Does auth fit into this pattern, or is it something that you really can meaningfully outsource to a library?