Clerk Changelog

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.

Happy Friday everyone! This week we had a chance to complete some much-needed chores out of our backlog.

Improved email deliverability

About 2 weeks ago, we saw an increase in email deliverability challenges for both verification codes and magic links, especially for development instances.

We identified the problem and implemented a fix, as well as improved our processes to identify and resolve future issues faster. Going forward, all emails will also be sent using an IP pool instead of an individual IP address to assist in our deliverability optimization.

Further, we can now accommodate customer's who would prefer their emails be sent from a dedicated IP address pool instead of our shared pool. If you're interested in using a dedicated pool, please contact support.

Sourcemaps now included in NPM libraries - open source on the way!

We've charted a course toward open-sourcing our NPM libraries and this week we've taken the next big step: including sourcemaps in our NPM libraries. You can browse @clerk/clerk-react on unpkg to take a quick look.⁠

Soon, all of our Javascript libraries will be consolidated in a public monorepo where we can discuss, track issues, and accept PRs. We can't wait!

One-time passcodes product page

Although they have been documented and available since we launched, our product page for email and SMS one-time passcodes (OTPs) has been missing. It finally landed this week, and we're thrilled to finally have product pages for every authentication factor we currently provide!

The most exciting part of this launch is that the page was completed by our new team dedicated to working on documentation and product pages. We're excited for the increased investment in these areas going forward, as it will certainly lead to Clerk becoming easier to learn about and use.

Happy 2022! We have an incredible year planned and can't wait to share the updates, right here in our changelog, every Friday.

Supabase integration

We're starting this year off with a bang. Over the holidays, our cofounder Braden put together the first version of our Supabase⁠ integration.

We're excited about this integration for several reasons:

1. Supabase was our most requested integration in the fourth quarter of 2021, and we're excited to finally unlock the capability.
2. We love the integration pathway that Supabase provides, and it's generated plans for the weeks ahead that will make this integration even better.
3. Empowering frontend developers is a core part of our thesis at Clerk. Just like Clerk empowers frontend developers with authentication capabilities, Supabase empowers frontend developers with database capabilities. It's a huge productivity increase for engineering teams, which no longer need to waste engineering cycles building CRUD endpoints for frontend developers to consume - now frontend developers can safely query the database directly.

Try out our beta Supabase integration today.

New Security informational page

As an authentication company, security must be our topmost priority - it's the only priority we place higher than developer experience. Security has been in our DNA from day one, with our founding engineers having significant web security expertise.

Admittedly, we haven't shared enough about our security efforts externally. For example, did you know we conduct regular, third-party security audits?

This week, we launched a new informational page that shares more about our security practices at Clerk.

Community spotlight: Firebase + Clerk recipe app by James Perkins

James Perkins⁠ launched a new video and written tutorial this week showing how to use Clerk and Firebase to create a recipe app⁠.

You might recognize James from our own website - we are big fans of his teaching style and have contracted with him to produce our own demos. It was a pleasant surprise to see this on his own channel this week, and we recommend you check it out!

Happy holidays everyone, and welcome to our very merry changelog!

Before stepping away for the holidays, we finished up a ton of new features to help your holiday side projects and beyond.

Although much of our team is off celebrating next week, we're still closely monitoring our uptime metrics and support channels - please drop us a line if there's anything we can help with.

Custom JWT templates for third-party authentication

JWTs have become the standard for syncing sessions between third-parties.

JWTs have always been the secret behind our integration with Hasura. When a user has an authenticated session with Clerk, we enable you to generate a special JWT for authentication with Hasura.

Now we've expanded on that concept, so you can generate custom JWTs to integrate with any vendor that supports them. Read more about generating custom JWTs in our documentation.

Improved security for magic links

Magic link emails now include the device type for extra security (e.g. "Chrome, OS X"). This extra information is to help ensure that users don't click the magic link if it was requested by someone else.

Easier onboarding

We've added a quickstart to our onboarding, so you can choose your desired configuration faster.

Easier productionizing

Moving Clerk to production requires you to configure some DNS settings. We've improved our dashboard to better guide you through the process.

New homepage

We've launched a new homepage to reinforce our commitment to the Modern Web and frameworks like Next.js, Gatsby, and Expo.

As we begin the holiday season, we're happy to be releasing some of our biggest projects of the quarter. Today's launch is in response to dozens of customer requests for greater customization capabilities.

Customizable email and SMS templates

You can now customize the email and SMS communications sent as part of sign-up and sign-in. Try it from the Customization tab of your dashboard today!

This feature allows you to ensure that the styling and tone of communications is perfectly in-line with your brand. Plus, the email editor can be used in both HTML and WYSIWYG modes, to provide a seamless editing experience regardless of your preference.

Customization capabilities remain a core focus at Clerk and many more are on the roadmap. We're eager to continue making improvements throughout 2022. Have a request? Drop us a line.

Dashboard launch!

Our new dashboard is officially out of beta!

Many thanks to our customers who participated in the beta and helped us iron out the last few wrinkles. Besides the updated design, we're thrilled with our new technology stack that will enable even faster innovation.

<SignInButton> and <SignUpButton> utilities

Our React and Next.js SDKs now expose <SignUpButton> and <SignInButton> utilities. They can be used to link to the sign-in and sign-up pages, or to open the sign-in and sign-up modals.

Check out our <SignInButton> documentation and our <SignUpButton> documentation.