Prior Work and Module Concept

The idea of this library is to re-use all the open-source implementation that already exist in the JS ecosystem instead of rolling our own. The idea was born when researching through the ecosystem of framework-specific authentication libraries to figure out what the best implementation approach for a state-of-the-art Nuxt 3 authentication library would be.

During research it became clear that implementing everything from scratch will be:

  • a lot of work that has already been open-sourced by others,
  • error prone as authentication has a lot of intricacies that need to be resolved in order to get it right,
  • hard to maintain as authentication providers come and go,
  • hard to build initial trust for as authentication is important and cannot go wrong,

In order to avoid these problems without taking forever (leaving Nuxt without an authentication library in the meantime), we decided to investigate if we can wrap NextAuth.js, the most popular authentication library in the Next.js ecosystem by far and a trusted, well maintained one at that!

In our investigation we found prior attempts to make NextAuth.js framework agnostic. These have more or less come to fruition, so far mostly resulting in some PoCs and example apps. Looking at these was quite helpful to get started. In particular, big pushes in the right direction came from:

The main part of the work was to piece everything together, resolve some outstanding issues with existing PoCs, add new things where nothing existed yet, e.g., for the useAuth composable by going through the NextAuth.js client code and translating it to a Nuxt 3 approach.

The module had another big iteration in collaboration with @JoaoPedroAS51 to make useAuth a sync operation and trigger the session lifecycle from a plugin rather than the useAuth composable itself.