We were taught how to roll our own auth at my boot camp just so we could have a deeper understanding on how it works and what can go wrong. Super valuable skill to have! to clarify, we did this from scratch, including hashing and salting passwords and using session tokens.
@@petleveler8366 not sure why my response was deleted lol. but I'll try again and say that I don't think most devs have implemented auth from scratch on their own.
Great high level tutorial for a very confusing topic! There are so many tutorials out there that make it seem like you have to start out at enterprise level complication, when in reality a setup like this is going to work great for most people.
Very concise explanation of JWT vs Sessions. Interesting to see how your take on the two has developed over the years. I find your videos super helpful when it comes to doing auth without 3rd party Lastly, it’s great seeing you Ben. Much peace and success brother
I've just watched several videos on this topic whilst deciding on how to proceed and this is by far the best one. I love fireship vids but this extra depth into pros and cons gives Jeff a run for his money. Keep it up! I'd love to see a collab between you two.
Ben, you're mi inspiration for becoming a web dev, it's been like 3 years since I started this journey seriously (at 17), now I have a decent job, thanks for existing brother, love your vids, we miss you homie !
Thanks a ton ... nobody explained it better and all in one video.. I will need to dig a bit more in CSRF and XSS bits.. but still crisp and yet adequately detailed. Kudos
Perfect timing for this. I had just decided to try rolling my own auth on my latest side project since its not critical, will be low traffic and I'm tired of auth feeling like such a black box.
You uploaded this video right when I needed it! You answered so many questions of mine in just 15 mins than I found answers online for last 2 days. Thank you so much. And please make a next video on how you setup username and password auth.
He's back! Great overview. I've rolled my own auth quite a few times and this is a great guide. Recently I've been using a self hosted zitadel instance for the user management and I have a reusable nestjs module for handling all the zitadel oauth stuff and session management etc. Super easy to add additional auth providers or implement 2fa via settings on zitadel without changing anything at all on my backend which is just basic session cookies storing access and refresh tokens for zitadel.
Personally I still don't buy into using JWTs for auth in the front-end. I think they're more applicable to server to server contexts. The argument that you don't have to make a database call to validate the user's session isn't that strong, since in most requests you're going to hit the database anyway in order to do anything useful. The extra database call isn't that big of a deal. Refresh tokens add unneeded complexity for most projects. It's a LOT simpler to just store a cryptographically unique session ID (like a UUIDv4) in a cookie and use that to look up the session in the DB/Redis. Not hating on the video, I just think people jump to JWTs, refresh tokens, etc because they're fancy and trendy, but they're often misused.
You are absolutely correct. JWTs irrevocability make them a great target in security assessments. If there is restricted data being hosted by the application (PII), I would never allow JWTs to be used for authentication from a security architecture perspective. Learn it, use it on non-sensitive apps, but don't rely on them to be a truly secure means of authentication. Not to mention the common misconfigurations that often allow them to be altered or bypassed altogether.
It would be easier to use sessions to authorize a user if you already use sessions for other things, like tracking user behaviour, storing useful information like user's wishlist (in e-commerce websites) etc.,. You just need to add one more parameter of userId in the database and you have a working authorization mechanism. But creating a whole new database server (assuming sessions are mostly stored in a separate Redis DB), just for authorizing would seem to be a overkill as compared to using something like JWTs which are much easire to integrate with no added work of managing another database. But again, it largely depends on the use-case of your application.
If you are not using jwts on high concurrent users you are going to get pegged by lots of db requests on each request because you needed database for validation, and your application will suck. Of course If you are developing an in-house app that will be used by less than 10000 users, you can get by using beefier servers, since you are not paying for the servers anyways.
My go-to method is to use JWT with a refresh token and token version, make the access token short-lived, like 15 min, and store it in the memory on the frontend.
you forgot to mention that when using for RS256 algorithm it is the private key used to create a JWT signature, and it's the public key that is used to veirfy the signature
great video, you should do a video on the username + password, but do the whole shebang too! Reset password, forgot username, two factor authentication, magic link too, etc.
Amazing video man!!! It's literally what I've been looking for lately. I would personally love a video talking about the username/password login approach. Greetings!
very good video, everything was super clear, maybe this is a bit niche or too specific to be useful but a video about how you'd go about rolling your own oauth provider would be very interesting imo
5:30 - in a microservice environment you are most likely going to have a token AND a session cache, especially if you are working on a complex business SaaS (software like Salesforce, AWS, SAP, etc.) with RBAC/ACL/etc. The API Gateway will validate the token and then look up the users permissions in the cache. You could store the permissions within the token, yes. BUT that is very complicated. Imagine you have a user and that user has a role with a bunch of permissions. What if the permissions of the role change or the role of the user changes while the user is logged in?
One benefit of cookie I think is SSR? JWTs stored in local storage cant be read on SSR since you won't be able to send it in the first document call, while if you use cookies you can fetch user data on the frontend server. Correct me if I am wrong
amazing video, please do more. this popped on my suggestions, clicked on it immediately. had to do jwt for a client, i didn't know how to set up the refresh token.
For me refresh token is usually not a JWT since accessing the database is happening there anyway. And that gives you the best of both worlds with revoking as well. Usually stored in redis with EX. Also for early MVP services I like to do a Frankenstein approach of letting an access token close to expiry refresh itself (works quite well, but obviously isn't as good as refresh tokens).
For the logic to invalidate the JWTs for ‘Signing out all devices’ why not have a Redis Cache/DB to keep track of blacklisted tokens, and set the expiration of that cached token to 15mins(or however your access token take long to expire). Now in your middleware, to validate the JWT you first check if the access token is blacklisted. Now when a user signs out of all devices, just have the other tokens in the blacklist cache. Your thought?
This section looks great. And going deep into passwords, how to get credentials, why is not ok to send the token in cookies and get it in headers... Can be good. And in the future, I see you doing a video like this but " Exploring Coolify", host your own "vercel". It would be awesome to see that. Thank you for the information!
A simpler way to invalidate tokens would be to create a table/collection for all your tokens. Then, when a user logouts, you search the table/collection for all tokens associated with that user and delete them.
the first auth I self-rolled was an OIDC IdP server to connect a third party to our existing session-based auth (not SaaS it was just for one particular partner). It was fiddly at first but once you get it, like most things, it doesn't feel so bad and I'd be much more confident doing it again if I had to
⏱ CHAPTERS ⏱(By TimeSkip AI) 00:00:00 - Introduction to Authentication Setup 00:01:30 - Setting Up Your VPS with Hostinger 00:02:51 - User Account Verification and Security 00:04:30 - Session Storage vs JWTs Explained 00:05:36 - Implementing JWTs for Authentication 00:06:52 - Managing User Sessions and Tokens 00:09:40 - Best Practices for Token Storage 00:11:35 - Front-End User Authentication Checks 00:12:41 - Conclusion and Resources
Hey Ben this was super helpful! I was wondering what's your strategy for refreshing tokens? Do you have a /refresh endpoint to handle this? But then how do you know when to call it? For example, say the expiry on your access token was 15 minutes. How does the client know "oh my 15 minutes is up, better go call the /refresh endpoint"? Do you use a timeout or do you poll in the background?
Bro thanks so much for this!! This was very useful and cleared a bunch of stuff for me!! Yes please do the next video if how you set up username/email and password
Hope you can also cover how to do Auth with SSR apps like ones created with NextJS. Refresh / Access no longer works or, at least, not in the same way as with SPA's. I think both tokens will be stored in cookies except for mutation requests.
Look into Lucia Auth. It's very straightforward and it has guides for NextJS and a few other frameworks. NextAuth should also be good, but I haven't tried it.
Yo how do you set up your oauth? what packages/libraries do you use/recommend? i try to avoid using as many packages as possible cause im stubborn so im curious what the pros/cons are or if they're literally needed.
I can recommend firebase auth its dirt cheap, very fast (although its session based auth), and simple to setup (no need to manage auth via ur database or redis urself)
What are the chances that I'm implementing this exact feature in the Google+JWT+Cookie fashion at this very moment for my first personal startup project lol Thanks, this made some things clearer
