Almost any application requires at least a very basic distinction between known users and guests, for example, to allow known users to store some of their information (such as their settings) in persistent storage on the backend side. It is quite obvious that users will want to access their data from anywhere, so we must fulfill this requirement.
Since the purpose of this book is a deep dive into Next.js, we will show how React and authentication best practices can be integrated specifically with Next.js.
But before we get started with the code, let's analyze the nature of the authentication process. It consists of several important aspects:
- Persistent storage of user credentials
- A method to send credentials to the server from the client side
- A check that finds the user and verifies the entered credentials
- A mechanism that signs all user requests so that the...