Secure Your Next.js App with NextAuth: A Guide to Using NextAuth for User Authentication and Authorization

Next.js is a popular framework for building server-side rendered React applications. When it comes to user authentication and authorization, Next.js provides a number of options, including NextAuth. NextAuth is an easy-to-use, open-source authentication library that works with a variety of authentication providers. In this blog post, we'll explore how to use NextAuth in Next.js.

Table of Contents:

1. Installing NextAuth
2. Configuring NextAuth
3. Adding Authentication to Your Pages
4. Conclusion

Installing NextAuth

To get started with NextAuth, you'll first need to install it in your Next.js application. You can do this by running the following command:

npm install next-auth

Once NextAuth is installed, you can create a new pages/api/auth/[...nextauth].js file to handle authentication requests.

Configuring NextAuth

NextAuth provides a number of authentication providers out of the box, including Google, Facebook, GitHub, and many others. To use one of these providers, you'll need to configure it in your pages/api/auth/[...nextauth].js file.

Here's an example configuration for using Google authentication:

import NextAuth from 'next-auth';
import Providers from 'next-auth/providers';

export default NextAuth({
  providers: [
    Providers.Google({
      clientId: process.env.GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID,
      clientSecret: process.env.GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET,
    }),
  ],
});

In this example, we're using the Google authentication provider and providing our clientId and clientSecret as environment variables.

Adding Authentication to Your Pages

With NextAuth configured, you can now add authentication to your pages. To do this, you'll need to wrap your page components with the withAuth higher-order component provided by NextAuth.

Here's an example of how to use withAuth:

import { withAuth } from 'next-auth/client';

function MyPage({ user }) {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Welcome, {user.name}</h1>
    </div>
  );
}

export default withAuth(MyPage);

In this example, we're using withAuth to wrap our MyPage component. The user object is passed to our component as a prop and contains information about the currently logged-in user.

Conclusion

NextAuth is a powerful authentication library that makes it easy to add authentication to your Next.js applications. With support for a variety of authentication providers and a simple configuration API, it's a great choice for any project that requires user authentication.