Auth System

An open-source project by Clove Software.

Why?

Supabase is an excellent Backend-as-a-Service offering built upon Postgres for small teams, with integrated features such as PostgREST and GoTrue authentication. This project allows you to use Supabase Auth while providing a unique face for your authentication service, as well as allowing for things like signle-sign-on.

This authentication service serves as the base of our infrastructure.

Flow

The intended flow looks a little something like this:

1. A user requests access to a page that requires the user to be logged in: https://app.clove.ie/home
2. The user is redirected to the authentication subdomain https://app.clove.ie -> https://auth.clove.ie/?ref=https://app.clove.ie/home.

Here we're redirecting the user to a SPA with a query parameter telling us where the user came from so we can subsequently call back to that URL with the access token.

3. The user is presented with a unified login experience across all applications, on https://auth.clove.ie which allows for commonly required features such as logging in with Google/Apple/Microsoft/whatever

4. On successful login, we call back to the reffering domain with the user's access token: https://auth.clove.ie/?ref=https://app.clove.ie/home?access-token=eyFfrgg...&refresh-token=eyFfrgg...

5. Now back in the app we can take the received access and refresh tokens and set the session data directly rather than using the login flow.

const { data, error } = supabase.auth.setSession({
  access_token,
  refresh_token
})