5 ms·

As someone who uses Django which has user management out of the box, why would I use a service like this?

by yuppiepuppie 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TameAntelope 6y ago
Django does not have this feature-set out of the box, that's for sure.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- theonething 6y ago
  Laravel does if you count installing their starter kit as out of the box.
- bredren 6y ago
  I’ve recently customized django-allauth to perform all modern expected user flows and it is actually a lot of work. Allauth itself is opinionated, and some things were built based on expectations that are not reflective of today’s web apps. It can be done but the lift is much bigger than one might think. I also think one of the most important parts of django is user/auth. Seeing FastAPI and modern frontends continually advance, and now this user management service, I’d suggest that Django is getting unbundled. The missing part to me seems to be a stand alone ORM and something to replace traditional view/templates so existing django devs could onboard easier. Maybe these already exist or are in development? I really like Django, but I do feel like there has been too much emphasis on stability and not enough experimentation to integrate API and modern frontend work into core. I think some of this has to do with how unstable django was in its earlier days. Sort of a ptsd from that. However, what has been forgotten is that it also allowed the project to handle changing developer needs and take market share from Drupal and others. The best example I have seen of this problem is in the ecommerce package, Solear. If you listen to the project founders in the the 4/2019 Python podcast, “Building Scalable Ecommerxe Sites on Saleor” you can hear the use case of the project falling away as modern frontend is coming into focus. [1] The challenge is that was two years ago. I actually see this as a problem for Python even beyond Django. [1] https://www.pythonpodcast.com/saleor-ecommerce-episode-205/ https://www.pythonpodcast.com/saleor-ecommerce-episode-205/
glutamate 6y ago
I think Django has by far the best story here, so much built in or activated with simple plugins. It took us an hour to add 2FA. On the other hand, looking at node.js it's really a dumpster fire[1]. Even when using passport, you are still back to writing the code to compare passwords at which point so much can go wrong. So there's a lot of scope for hosted services. This of course compounds the problem because those service providers are GREAT at SEO and content marketing, so now a lot of Google hits on nodejs auth end up recommending Auth0 &friends. [1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/your-node-js-authentication-tutorial-is-wrong-f1a3bf831a46 https://medium.com/hackernoon/your-node-js-authentication-tu...
- notJim 6y ago
  I used PassportJS on a project last year, and a) it was a total nightmare to get it working, with very poor documentation and b) it does almost nothing. It's basically the "now draw an owl" meme of auth.
- bezieio 6y ago
  I've been building a Next.js app with a Django backend using django-rest-framework and dj-rest-auth. dj-rest-auth[1] handles auth and registration out of the box and takes no time to get up and running. [1] https://dj-rest-auth.readthedocs.io/ https://dj-rest-auth.readthedocs.io/
dannycastonguay 6y ago
"Batteries included" Django is a no brainer for a lot of use cases. True. But clerk.dev seems to be targeting teams that use (javascript) microframeworks. They are building something people want and the pricing seems to scale well up to 100K users. If you have millions of users, I'm sure their enterprise team will give better deals than $0.05 / MAUs.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  > the pricing seems to scale well up to 100K users I'm not sure I agree. This isn't really an infrastructure cost, it's a direct COGS (cost of goods sold) cost, and hits the service's margin. For a SaaS business charging $10-1000 per month per user it's fine. For a retail business though I think this could be prohibitively expensive. Let's say you have a 10% conversion rate and $100 a year spend for customers, that's actually only $0.83 a month per active user. This is a 6% margin hit. Sure, maybe in retail you often don't need non-customers to log in, but maybe you do. Or maybe your active users correlate much more strongly with your paying users, but maybe they don't. Content-led, email newsletter style business could struggle with this pricing.
  - pcthrowaway 6y ago
    You would have to have all of your users (converting and non-converting) still logging in / using the service monthly for this math to work out, as they charge by monthly active users.. I'm sure this happens somewhere, and that's probably not the most ideal place for Clerk.
tschellenbach 6y ago
Common use case is when you multiple apps that all require the same auth infrastructure. IE a suite of apps for a business.
- lmeyerov 6y ago
  Literally just launching this for our site today. A bunch of boring Django views, a couple React <> Node apps for crazy fontend stuff, and a PyData ~flask app for backend. Django gives accounts + login screens + JWT/CSRF APIs, and the JS/PyData stuff just pass around CSRF/JWTs as usual. Reverse proxy does extra stuff, but not essential for security. I would love to see allauth extended with some sort of React toolkit so we could do SPA logins without refresh. That seems like a much smaller lift..
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

As someone who uses Django which has user management out of the box, why would I use a service like this?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

TameAntelope 6y ago

Django does not have this feature-set out of the box, that's for sure.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
theonething 6y ago
Laravel does if you count installing their starter kit as out of the box.
bredren 6y ago
I’ve recently customized django-allauth to perform all modern expected user flows and it is actually a lot of work. Allauth itself is opinionated, and some things were built based on expectations that are not reflective of today’s web apps. It can be done but the lift is much bigger than one might think. I also think one of the most important parts of django is user/auth. Seeing FastAPI and modern frontends continually advance, and now this user management service, I’d suggest that Django is getting unbundled. The missing part to me seems to be a stand alone ORM and something to replace traditional view/templates so existing django devs could onboard easier. Maybe these already exist or are in development? I really like Django, but I do feel like there has been too much emphasis on stability and not enough experimentation to integrate API and modern frontend work into core. I think some of this has to do with how unstable django was in its earlier days. Sort of a ptsd from that. However, what has been forgotten is that it also allowed the project to handle changing developer needs and take market share from Drupal and others. The best example I have seen of this problem is in the ecommerce package, Solear. If you listen to the project founders in the the 4/2019 Python podcast, “Building Scalable Ecommerxe Sites on Saleor” you can hear the use case of the project falling away as modern frontend is coming into focus. [1] The challenge is that was two years ago. I actually see this as a problem for Python even beyond Django. [1] https://www.pythonpodcast.com/saleor-ecommerce-episode-205/ https://www.pythonpodcast.com/saleor-ecommerce-episode-205/

glutamate 6y ago

I think Django has by far the best story here, so much built in or activated with simple plugins. It took us an hour to add 2FA. On the other hand, looking at node.js it's really a dumpster fire[1]. Even when using passport, you are still back to writing the code to compare passwords at which point so much can go wrong. So there's a lot of scope for hosted services. This of course compounds the problem because those service providers are GREAT at SEO and content marketing, so now a lot of Google hits on nodejs auth end up recommending Auth0 &friends. [1] https://medium.com/hackernoon/your-node-js-authentication-tutorial-is-wrong-f1a3bf831a46 https://medium.com/hackernoon/your-node-js-authentication-tu...

notJim 6y ago
I used PassportJS on a project last year, and a) it was a total nightmare to get it working, with very poor documentation and b) it does almost nothing. It's basically the "now draw an owl" meme of auth.
bezieio 6y ago
I've been building a Next.js app with a Django backend using django-rest-framework and dj-rest-auth. dj-rest-auth[1] handles auth and registration out of the box and takes no time to get up and running. [1] https://dj-rest-auth.readthedocs.io/ https://dj-rest-auth.readthedocs.io/

dannycastonguay 6y ago

"Batteries included" Django is a no brainer for a lot of use cases. True. But clerk.dev seems to be targeting teams that use (javascript) microframeworks. They are building something people want and the pricing seems to scale well up to 100K users. If you have millions of users, I'm sure their enterprise team will give better deals than $0.05 / MAUs.

danpalmer 6y ago
> the pricing seems to scale well up to 100K users I'm not sure I agree. This isn't really an infrastructure cost, it's a direct COGS (cost of goods sold) cost, and hits the service's margin. For a SaaS business charging $10-1000 per month per user it's fine. For a retail business though I think this could be prohibitively expensive. Let's say you have a 10% conversion rate and $100 a year spend for customers, that's actually only $0.83 a month per active user. This is a 6% margin hit. Sure, maybe in retail you often don't need non-customers to log in, but maybe you do. Or maybe your active users correlate much more strongly with your paying users, but maybe they don't. Content-led, email newsletter style business could struggle with this pricing.
- pcthrowaway 6y ago
  You would have to have all of your users (converting and non-converting) still logging in / using the service monthly for this math to work out, as they charge by monthly active users.. I'm sure this happens somewhere, and that's probably not the most ideal place for Clerk.

tschellenbach 6y ago

Common use case is when you multiple apps that all require the same auth infrastructure. IE a suite of apps for a business.

lmeyerov 6y ago
Literally just launching this for our site today. A bunch of boring Django views, a couple React <> Node apps for crazy fontend stuff, and a PyData ~flask app for backend. Django gives accounts + login screens + JWT/CSRF APIs, and the JS/PyData stuff just pass around CSRF/JWTs as usual. Reverse proxy does extra stuff, but not essential for security. I would love to see allauth extended with some sort of React toolkit so we could do SPA logins without refresh. That seems like a much smaller lift..

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]