Using middleware for authentication

[bakura10]

Hi !

One of the biggest imporvement of React Router 7 is the support for middlewares. Middlewares should allows moving the authenticate to a single middleware, hence removing the need to call authenticate on every loader. However it does not seem to be used in this template. Any reason why?

Thanks

[kyrylo-soulandwolf]

@bakura10 As amazing as it would have been to use middleware, it's still an unstable and experimental feature, so it's not something that should be included in the template people use to spin up production apps. I'm guessing that's the reason.

[bakura10]

You're correct, I was thinking it was no longer experimental, my bad ;)

[byrichardpowell]

Hey 👋

Yeah, the unstable nature of the API is why we didn't include middleware. We want to avoid situations that are going to cost you unnecessary maintenance or problems.

That said, we did experiment with it (here's a branch). I think we'll move to middleware eventually as it improves performance and it might allow us to make dealing with Response headers easier. But not whilst the API is still unstable.

[bakura10]

@byrichardpowell as part of React-Router 7.9.0, middleware is no longer experimental. Could this issue be re-open? There are probably ton of nice improvements that can be done now to make it way more easier to use (no longer need to authenticate on every loader :d)

[byrichardpowell]

Hey @bakura10 👋

I'll reopen this since Middleware is something we want. Just to set expectations though; It might take us a while to get to this as there is some work we need to prioritize first 👍

[zirkelc]

@byrichardpowell how up-to-date is your branch for middleware auth?

https://github.com/Shopify/shopify-app-template-react-router/tree/admin-middleware-poc

[KostasTur]

Any update on this @byrichardpowell ? This would be a major perf improvement for many apps :)

[byrichardpowell]

Hey folk 👋

We haven't been able to work on this yet and it's low on our list, so it might be a while.

For what it's worth, you should be able to wrap authenticate.X in a middleware fairly easily. Pass the request to the authenticate function, then set it's return object as context.

@zirkelc That branch was me experimenting when middleware were very early. It contains stuff that might not be too helpful, so I'd probably avoid it.