bnjmn.

auth in astro

2025-03-25

I recently revisted Astro to see what’s new - and it turns out, there’s a lot. You have AstroDB; endpoints; “actions”; suspense-type components with server:defer. (To be clear, some of these features have been around since v4.0+ - I just didn’t know about them, since my primary usecase revolves around static content.)

Why the revitalized interest in Astro? Well, I’ve been learning the latest version of Next.js, and I figured I should do the same for Astro.

One of my major complaints with Next.js is that auth is kind of a PITA to implement - so I took it upon myself to see how Astro fares.

Auth.js

The AstroJS docs and Github repo have different examples - and both don’t work? Something is missing, and I couldn’t figure it out. I can’t recommend this. Not the Astro integration, anyway.

Clerk

“It just works”

Steps taken:

  • Sign up on the Clerk website
  • Add environment variables to project
  • Import Astro integration
  • Click on button - you’re signed in

But, there’s a lot of “magic” involved. And if you need fine-grained control, you might not find it here. A quote from Reddit:

You’re relinquishing parts of your auth, user management, and the stewardship of that data to Clerk, a 3rd party company.

Opinion: use this if you just want a way to log users in, and not much beyond that.

Better-Auth

cd node_modules/better-sqlite3/
npx node-gyp rebuild
# back in project root
npx @better-auth/cli generate
✔ Do you want to generate the schema to ./better-auth_migrations/2025-03-24T21-06-18.513Z.sql? … yes
2025-03-24T21:06:20.382Z SUCCESS [Better Auth]: 🚀 Schema was generated successfully!
  • Must run migrations after that
  • Docs seem a bit lacking

Hit a few snags here and there, but mostly of the resolvable kind - fixable given an hour + a cup of coffee.

Doesn’t seem too bad overall. Less magic. Might be worth considering if you’re already using an ORM like Drizzle, since they provide integrations for that (actually, they provide a whole lot of integrations).

Lucia

You essentially roll your own, so I ended up skipping this one.

Pros: you have control.

Cons: you have control.

Supabase

I have to say, the docs for this are really good. Getting auth to work wasn’t much more work than copy-pasting the code examples provided. I think this would be a really good option to consider if you’re already using Supabase in your project. I’d have to assume that the same goes for Firebase.

Closing

TLDR: pretty straightforward, no hair-pulling, docs are way better than Next.js. Really hope Astro takes off in a big way