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#auth#better#open#source#using#more#keycloak#vercel#still#system
Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Talk: https://ben3d.ca/blog/passwordless-login-system
Live Demo: https://passwordless.ben3d.ca
Demo Code: https://github.com/bhouston/passwordless
If you are building a user system with a database already, adding passwordless auth is easy.
But you need something as a backup to passkeys so I choose emailed OTP, but it isn't meant to be the primary way to log in.
Most complex open source projects like Linux for example have a lot of contributions by corporations. The GPL kind of forces them to participate in open source, instead of just creating internal forks.
GPL and even LGPL are tricky for libraries though.
the team at Vercel has been my biggest inspiration and always reflected many of the reasons we started working on Better Auth. This would allow us to focus more on what made better-auth great in the first place It hasn't even been 2 years since we started but thank you everyone from the open-source community for helping us make an impact in short amount of time. There is a lot to do to improve on open source auth and im really excited to be back focusing full time on building
https://www.keycloak.org
https://www.cncf.io/blog/2023/04/11/keycloak-joins-cncf-as-a...
(some of those features are enterprise only)
The self-hosted space is another headache. I wasted so much time trying to make smaller self-hosted auth solutions work, since Keycloak has a reputation for being heavyweight.
I looked into the Ory stack extensively trying to actually use it as advertised for self-hosted / open-source auth. It's aggressively gimped and its SSO features are emphatically _not_ open-source and are gated behind licensing, with no way to find out until you're actually running it.
It's also just unfinished. Their "stack" is a lot of cobbled-together Go mixed with incompletely rebranded acquisitions like SAML Jackson (now "Polis"), which they managed to gut so completely it went from a best-in-class OSS library to unusable.
Open source development needs to be paid by someone - most of the time people complaining about paying for software are working themselves (for money!) in some company making huge bucks, or looking up to "successful (as in money) tech leaders".
For Ory, B2B login is a good value differentiator, because it's required by companies selling to other companies meaning they can spend some money on licenses to further develop software.
Ory powers the largest technology providers, and super small solo projects. It's robust, stable, Apache2 licensed. It's the best CIAM tech out there that's free (!!).
In the end, everyone is entitled to their opinion but the "open source can't make money" train is honestly a bottom tier opinion and I'm tired of reading it on HN, probably written by people making $100K+ a year for writing software and using open source daily (without paying a dime).
It's like the people complaining that Wikipedia is collecting too many donations, while they cheer on Apple or Anthropic or whoever raking in billions of dollars.
Somehow, only if it's open source / non profit it's bad to make money. If it's proprietary nobody gives a damn. Says a lot about society.
It also really shows its age, imo. The interface is clunky, roles and groups having overlapping responsibilities is confusing, making custom UIs for it makes me feel ancient, etc.
I really can't complain though. There is simply no alternative that's as open atm. It's also not easy to make one ( I tried :( ).
It's Apache 2.0 and a CNCF incubating project.
[^] https://openfga.dev/
Just before I hurl myself at this for several days/weeks -- where were the pain points? I'm usually wary of new projects in this space but OpenFGA looks pretty mature already
i really loved better-auth’s DX but the nature of their database adapters means it’s relatively easy to switch over to another provider/library
Better Auth is the go-to solution for many people using Nextjs, so it makes sense that Vercel puts some effort in maintaining it.
I have never had issues running Nextjs in regular containers, it is just a good open source solution, I don't see why it would be any different with Better Auth.
Anything that makes it easier for developers to build secure applications is a win!
Best of luck over there!
Glad I decided to roll my own auth rather then using some library. I had a feeling that eventually they will join Vercel.
but to me that’s less risk than our auth getting bought by somebody whose business goals don’t necessarily align with mine.
With current AI your agents probably still will be better with maintaining a fork. Auth libs have pretty limited API surfaces comparing to e.g. ui frameworks.
I work in the auth space (for FusionAuth) and we run into plenty of folks that started out rolling auth themselves. Just username and password right? A bit of hashing, salting and leveraging a built-in crypto library.
But then you need to add account recovery. And then MFA. And then registration. And then progressive registration. And then webhook integration. And then passkeys. And then SAML integration. And the delegated SAML setup. And then and then and then.
You're distracted from your core application by feature requests for your login system.
You have lots of options nowadays. Use a library provided by your framework (Rails, Spring, and Django have them), use a tool like Better Auth, use a third party system like FusionAuth or Auth0. But don't build undifferentiated functionality that impacts your user experience.
PS Of course, where I stand depends on where I sit, but I firmly believe that you should not build an auth system the same way you should not build a database.
For an MVP or a prototype, I think it's okay to use an off-the-shelf tool. For something serious that will have long-term legs, I would do it myself. I hear all of your concerns and arguments and agree there are a lot of footguns. But again, having spent the better part of my adult life using and interfacing with these tools, I have an innate understanding of how to model auth correctly (separate it from the user, separate users from an 'org' or 'team' entity, etc).
You said it though, 'it depends' is really the right answer here.
I've heard plenty of stories of folks moving from homegrown auth to a off-the-shelf solution, but that's because I'm in the off-the-shelf auth space.
It'd be super interesting to hear stories of folks who went the other way, and outgrew their service provider's auth.
And it's funny this same argument can be said since Sonnet 3.7. But the issues still pop up.