Using BaaS with custom Backend

Fabian Diez — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 13:54:45 +0000

Let me preface this by saying that I have little experience with Authentication on the front-end side, as my professional work is mostly backend/cloud or has authentication already set up so I rarely have to deal with setting up an authentication flow from front- to backend myself.
However, I wanted to expand my knowledge on this, and looked up a few modern solutions for authentication solutions in the frontend - this is where I am a bit confused and could use some guidance.
From my research, it looks like a lot of project are using BaaS like Firebase or Supabase, which looks very promising for the type of side-project I am planning to do. Unfortunately it looks like the platform are (more or less) strictly BaaS, where you would write you backend logic using either SSR or with serverless functions on each respective platform. I understand the appeal of this - and I thinks it's quite a clean approach - but it not something I would like to do for my current project, as I have quite a perfectly working API written in Rust which I'd like to use as part of this project.

So my question would be:

What would be a clean, modern approach for perform frontend authentication? I am using Svelte for my frontend, and I've taken a look at NextAuth.js. But as this is still im Beta, there must be some better options available as well, right?

Is it possible to use a platform like Supabase to only perform Authentication, i.e. provide the frontend which credentials, which can then be used in my own, custom backend? Or are people usually only using these service as part of a "full-stack" application with SSR - in contrast to a more traditional approach with a custom backend.

Any tips/help would be appreciated, thanks!

DEV Community: Fabian Diez

Using BaaS with custom Backend