Token based authentication with Auth.js

This guide will show you how to enable token based authentication with Auth.js (NextAuth) in an existing Next.js + WunderGraph application.

Requirements

Before starting you need to have a Next.js application with NextAuth.js installed and configured. If you don't have one, you can follow the NextAuth.js documentation to create one.

Make sure you have enabled the jwt session strategy. You can find more information about the jwt strategy in the NextAuth.js documentation .

Configure WunderGraph

wundergraph.config.ts

Add a token-based authentication provider to your wundergraph.config.ts file and configure the userInfoEndpoint to fetch the user information from the NextAuth.js session. This will point to an Next.js api route that we will create later.

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// ...
authentication: {
    tokenBased: {
        providers: [
            {
                userInfoEndpoint: 'http://localhost:3000/api/auth/session',
            },
        ],
    },
},
// ...

Note that we have added the configuration for token based authentication. We are using the userInfoEndpoint to fetch the user information from the NextAuth.js session. The userInfoEndpoint is called with the Authorization header containing the JWT token that we will setup later.

This also assumes that you have installed NextAuth in pages/api/auth/[...nextauth].ts, if you use another path you need to adjust the userInfoEndpoint accordingly.

wundergraph.operations.ts

Next, we can enable authentication for all operations.

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import { configureWunderGraphOperations } from '@wundergraph/sdk';
import type { OperationsConfiguration } from './generated/wundergraph.operations';


export default configureWunderGraphOperations<OperationsConfiguration>({
  operations: {
    defaultConfig: {
      authentication: {
        required: true,
      },
    },
  },
});

Configure Next.js with middleware

The last step is to make sure we forward the session token to the WunderGraph API. We will do this using Next.js middleware, with the middleware we can add the NextAuth session token to the Authorization header and forward it to WunderGraph.

If you don't want to use Next.js middleware you can also use the useAuthMiddleware hook to inject the token into the Authorization header. Continue reading in the next step.

Create middelware.ts in the root of your Next.js application.

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import { NextResponse } from 'next/server';
import type { NextRequest } from 'next/server';


// the middleware will run for all requests that match this pattern,
// we don't actually need to define an api route for this.
export const config = {
  matcher: '/api/wg/:function*',
};


export function middleware(request: NextRequest) {
  // retrieve the session token from the cookie
  const token = request.cookies.get('next-auth.session-token')?.value;


  let pathname = request.nextUrl.pathname.replace('/api/wg', '');


  // rewrite the api url to the WunderGraph API
  const url = new URL(pathname + request.nextUrl.search, 'http://127.0.0.1:9991');


  // add the token to the Authorization header
  const headers = new Headers({
    Authorization: `Bearer ${token}`,
  });


  // rewrite the request to the WunderGraph API
  const response = NextResponse.rewrite(url, {
    request: {
      headers,
    },
  });


  return response;
}

What happens now is that all requests to http://localhost:3000/api/wg/* will be rewritten to our WunderGraph API at http://127.0.0.1:9991/api/* with the NextAuth session token added to the Authorization header.

WunderGraph will add the Authorization header to the userInfoEndpoint request which will return the user information if the token is valid and the request will be authenticated.

Configure Next.js useAuthMiddleware

If you don't want to use middleware you can also use the useAuthMiddleware middleware to inject the token into the Authorization header.

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import { Middleware } from 'swr';
import { useAuthMiddleware } from '@wundergraph/nextjs';
import { withWunderGraph } from '../components/generated/nextjs';
import { getToken } from 'next-auth/jwt';


const useAuthToken: Middleware = (useSWRNext) => {
  return useAuthMiddleware(useSWRNext, async () => {
    return await getToken();
  });
};


function MyApp() {
  return <div>My App</div>;
}


export default withWunderGraph(MyApp, {
  use: [useAuthToken],
});

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