Clerk Changelog

Redwood guide

We've had a chance to connect more closely with the Redwood team and our integration experience is rapidly improving.

After launching a tutorial two weeks ago, we heard a lot of feedback that we were missing our standard integration docs. Those docs are now live.

Thanks to the contributors: Ian McPhail

Remix new SDK and guide

Our beta for Remix continues! After receiving a few bug reports and great ideas for improvements, we launched a new version of the SDK today.

We also put together a new Getting Started guide⁠ so developers no longer need to reverse-engineer our demo repository.

Thanks to the contributors: Nikos Douvlis, Colin Sidoti

The Organization object is coming soon!

At Clerk, we've always wanted to help developers with Customer Management, not just User Management. Depending on your business, you might sell to Users (B2C) or Organizations (B2B).

Starting late next week, we'll begin rolling out support for a Clerk-managed Organization object. The launch will start with frontend APIs first, including:

• An API to create an organization
• An API to invite other users to the organization
• An API to set users roles within the organization

The organization(s) that a user is part of will become part of their short-lived session JWT, so Clerk will start assisting with "authorization" in addition to "authentication."

This is just the beginning of Organization management at Clerk. Ultimately, we expect about half of our team to be focused solely on Organization management this year - including to build common requests like component UIs, SAML authentication, and subscription management. Stay tuned :)

If you would like to be included in the beta, please contact support

Thanks to the contributors: Alex Ntousias, Giannis Katsanos, Peter Perlepes, Nikos Petridis, Shawn Winters, Rishi Raman, Braden Sidoti, Colin Sidoti

@clerk/remix SDK launch

We're incredibly excited to announce that our @clerk/remix⁠ package is now in public beta!

We've published an example repository on Github and improved documentation will be available in the next week.

Remix was a challenging integration because it is both React-first and SSR-first, a combination we hadn't explored before. Ultimately, we implemented our SDK so it works "the Remix way" instead of being influenced by our previous SDKs for client-side React or static-generated Next.js.

This SDK is still in beta and we're very interested in your feedback. If you have comments, questions, concerns, ideas, or feedback, please reach out to support!

Thanks to the contributors: Nikos Douvlis, Peter Perlepes, Sokratis Vidros, Colin Sidoti

Fauna integration

Just two weeks ago, we received feedback to add a Fauna integration⁠ to Clerk.

Our new developer champion, Ian, started work on it right away and today it's ready!

This is now our fourth integration with a frontend-accessible database, adding to the set of Hasura, Supabase, and Firebase.

Would you like to see another integration added? We work particularly well with services that vendors JWT authentication, but we're happy explore any customer request. Please reach out to support.

Thanks to the contributors: Ian McPhail

Instant development instances

When you create a new application in Clerk, the confetti falls and you can now immediately access your newly created sign up form. In the past, it took 1-2 minutes for this to load.

Thanks to the contributors: Marcel Cruz, Sokratis Vidros

Customization quick links

In development, our hosted components now included quick links for customization.

Thanks to the contributors: Marcel Cruz

Usernames from social logins

We now save usernames from social login providers that provide them through their OpenID connect flow. This includes:

• Github
• Gitlab
• Twitter
• Bitbucket
• Discord
• Twitch

The username is accessible in the external_accounts section of the User object.

Frontend-accessible database suite

Clerk now has integrations with three different vendors who enable frontend developers to make database queries, including:

• Supabase
• Hasura
• Firebase

These vendors share an ethos with Clerk. We each believe in empowering frontend developers to do more on their own, without requiring the assistance of a backend developer.

Up next, we we will add Fauna to the suite.

Dropbox and Bitbucket social login

This week, we added Dropbox and Bitbucket to our list of social login providers.

We're particularly excited to add Bitbucket, which rounds out the version control suite of Bitbucket, Gitlab, and Github.

Next, we plan to add Microsoft, Apple, and Notion.

BCrypt and Django password migrations

Our API endpoint for migrating users now accepts both BCrypt and Django-style (pbkdf2-sha256) password digests.

Need to migrate a different password digest? Please contact support and we can add support in under 1 week.

Open source Javascript

Our complete Javascript repository⁠ is now open source! We're incredibly excited about the efficiency gains this will bring – both for our team and our customers. Coming soon, we will publish a blog post about all the productivity features we've packed into this monorepo.

Thanks to the contributors: Peter Perlepes, Nikos Douvlis, Sokratis Vidros

Improved Supabase integration

We updated our Supabase guide to use our new JWT templates feature. Now, Clerk generates the JWT that is necessary to authorize queries, so less code is needed in your backend.

Our new JWT templates allow developers to create completely custom JWTs, or assign custom claims to our prebuilt templates like Supabase. In the two weeks since launch, over 50 unique JWT templates have been deployed to production.

We're absolutely delighted to see JWTs being put to widespread use so quickly. If you would like to see a JWT template for your favorite service, please contact support to have it added.

Thanks to the contributors: Braden Sidoti, Mark Pitsilos, Agis Anastasopoulos, Haris Chaniotakis, Cooper Dawson

LinkedIn Social Login

LinkedIn has been added a Social Login provider. Create an application to try it out!

Over the next few weeks, we have plans to add Microsoft, Apple, and Dropbox. If you need a provider which is not listed, please contact us to have it added.

Thanks to the contributors: Haris Chaniotakis

Metadata for invitations

Metadata can now be added to invitations. If the invitation is accepted, the metadata will automatically be added to the newly created User object.

Thanks to the contributors: Alex Ntousias

Credit where credit is due

I'm sure you already noticed, but starting this week, we're now acknowledging team members for their incredible contributions directly in the changelog. Many thanks, team!

Thanks to the contributors: Charles Wefso, Cooper Dawson

A note on Remix

Last week we promised a Remix launch for this week. Unfortunately, we misunderstood their documentation and underestimated how long the build would take. Stay tuned - Remix support remains a top priority for us!

Like many other weeks at Clerk, our work this week was focused on the enabling the modern web. We're thrilled to be part of this ecosystem that is improving both developer productivity and application speeds.

SSR support for Next.js

Our biggest launch was server-side rendering support for Next.js, which has been our top request for the past several months, and really amplified in the past few weeks.

You can try out SSR for Next.js today: check out our documentation.

While Next.js gets the headline, the bulk of our work was in creating generic building-blocks that can be adapted to any server-rendered framework, and both Node and V8 isolate runtimes (like Cloudflare workers and Vercel middleware). We plan to add Remix support next.

Improved Hasura integration

This week we completely revamped our Hasura integration to use our new JWT Templates feature. When we launched Hasura 6 months ago, we had no idea it would become one of our most popular integrations, and have been pleasantly surprised at the response.

While most developers found our standard JWT claims to be sufficient, a few have requested a way to customize the claims. This week, we made that possible.

Check our brand new guide to integrating Hasura and Clerk.

Custom JWT signing keys

This week we also added the ability to set a custom private key for signing JWTs. Check out the JWT Templates tab in your dashboard to see it an action!

Community spotlight: Avneesh Agarwal

We first met Avneesh when we ran a hackathon with Hashnode last summer. Since then, we've followed him on Twitter and enjoy his regular postings of guides and developer tips.

Last week, we were absolutely thrilled when he posted a great guide for Clerk's new Web3 authentication support. Thank you, Avneesh!

What a week! The first few sprints after the holidays came to a close this week, and wow are things moving fast. We had major releases all across the company.

Open-source Javascript

This week we launched our open source Javascript monorepo, clerkinc/javascript⁠.

The change is primarily in response to the community. We tested the waters with open source over the past few months and the result is clear: open source SDKs are better for the community and better for Clerk.

The biggest points that convinced us of this path forward are:

1. It's easier for the community to build their own SDKs when our official SDKs are public
2. It's easier for the community to point out issues to us - we've loved receiving PRs or bug reports pointing at a specific line of code
3. It's easier to support developers when we can point at the code that runs under the hood

Beyond that, our team simply enjoys building in public. We're excited for a future where this changelog can point at PRs being merged.

Web3 authentication

We launched Web3 authentication! Learn more about our motivations and the future roadmap in our Web3 announcement post.

Easier onboarding

Our new onboarding offers easy-to-download starter repos, complete with API keys included. These changes make it easier than ever to start a new application on Clerk.

Improved cross-origin auth documentation

There must be something in 2022's water, because suddenly we received a dozen questions about authenticating cross-origin requests. Indeed, our documentation on this topic was lacking, and we put together a new guide complete with examples for fetch, useSWR, and react-query.

Check out our new guide on authenticating backend requests.

The ultimate guide to Next.js auth

If you've followed this changelog long enough, it's no surprise that we love Next.js at Clerk. This blog was built with Next.js and so was our dashboard.

But authentication in Next.js is a surprisingly challenging problem, and we wanted to put together a more comprehensive guide about why it's hard and the options available.

So far we've written 2 of the 7 chapters we've planned. Check it out here, and stay tuned as we'll continue to add more chapters over the next several weeks.