Kinde is an identity and access management platform that provides authentication and authorization services for web applications. It’s one of the direct auth0 competitors.
The first thing that strikes you from the business side is that we get more options in the free version as well as higher limits for active users. It is also less expensive than auth0 when we finally reach the free limits. For startups that often use a cloud-based authentication model, this is a significant convenience.
Anyway, back to the library. Installation of codeigniter-kinde is pretty basic:
composer require michalsn/codeigniter-kinde
Then we have to migrate our database. This library comes with the ready to use users table, so if you have your own users table, be sure to implement all fields that exists in this package.
php spark migrate --all
Now we have to copy a config file to our’s app namespace:
php spark kinde:publish
The last thing is to fill the config file with our credentials. You can read more about it in the getting started article.
This package comes with predefined routes to: login, register, logout and for the callback URL (which is used to finalize authentication).
The best part is that you don’t have to do anything but just use this URL’s in your app. Since login and registration are done via Kinde site, everything is ready to use just few seconds after we fill the config file.
We also have a universal kinde filter that can serve as a guard for your app.
We can also check things manually in the controller if we want. If we decide to define the permissions, we can also check for them very easy:
if (authenticated() && can('edit_post')) {
// ...
}