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0 pointspbowyer6y ago0 comments

> The Authn/Authz story of Phoenix is a joke though compared to Rails/Devise or Django. The framework authors refuse to ship a first party implementation and instead leave it to the community.

I agree, but it's not unique to Phoenix. In the PHP world the otherwise excellent Symfony framework is only starting to add generation of authentication/authorization, and email confirmation and password reset remains the developer's responsibility.

I see two reasons for this.

1. Frameworks see themselves as building blocks, not RAD systems. When the core framework developers are (mostly) working on APIs they don't see the need for approval/password reset. After all "you'll issue the user with a JWT so who cares about the rest (shrug)"

2. Flexibility to auth with anything. Apparently not bundling a system makes it more "flexible".

I believe (1) to (a) be shortsighted and (b) we need RAD frameworks, of higher-level flexible components that can be bolted together.

I believe (2) is wrong, and bundling standard auth flows does not reduce flexibility: you implement your own if you need something else.

0 comments

conradfr6y ago

That's partially true because you have FosUserBundle as kind of defacto standard for user facing auth (but yes it's a community package) and many built-in things for APi auth.

pbowyerOP6y ago

FosUserBundle is no longer recommended, and is superseded by Guard. Guard is considerably nicer to work with, and doesn't take long to build the extra bits (password reset etc) but (a) it's not built-in, and (b) if done as a bundle, it doesn't get the same level of support.

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