Clerk Changelog

Clerk Avatars

Clerk improved the default avatars for users who haven't uploaded a profile image by adding customization options. These unique avatars are designed to add an extra level of polish to your application and can be fully customized to align with your brand.

Customization

Avatars can easily be customized via the dashboard under Customization > Avatars. In there, you can adjust the following settings:

• Background: Select from an array of color options and effects. You can retain the default marble effect, which accommodates up to five colors, or opt for a solid background.
• Foreground: Choose from a diverse range of colors and styles. Your options encompass initials, silhouette, or none at all.

An Eye-Catching Shimmer

To add a unique touch, we've implemented a subtle shimmer animation on our internal avatar component. This is available on the <UserButton /> component and you can enable the shimmer effect using the appearance prop:

<UserButton
  appearance={{
    layout: {
      shimmer: true,
    },
  }}
/>

Learn more in this blog post →

Other Fixes & Improvements

• Change domains and subdomains for production instances via the Dashboard. (Link to Docs)
• Added sorting capabilities Clerk Backend API organization membership and user list endpoints. (Org Membership, User)
• Implemented allowedOrigins prop to mitigate the risk of open redirect vulnerabilities.
• Added new I18n translations for Clerk JS, including Japanese [PR]⁠ and Hebrew [PR]⁠, thanks to community contributions.
• Introduced a feature to delete satellite domains in the multi-domain configuration. (Link to Docs)
• Enhanced password reset flow for strong password verification, adjustable complexity settings, and guidance cues. (Read More)

Upcoming Events

RenderATL – May 31st to June 2nd

Several team members are heading down to Atlanta to participate in RenderATL⁠. If you are attending, we would love to meet you! Keep an eye out for our team who will be handing out warm cookies and invitations to community-driven side events.

CityJS – May 29th to May 31st

Our engineering team is heading to CityJS⁠ in Athens with swag. Be sure to tune in for a talk from our VP of Engineering, Sokratis Vidros⁠, on how to add authentication to your Next.js app in just 7 minutes.

Community Shoutouts

• A big thank you to Raz Levi⁠ and Daichi Ninomiya⁠ for their pull request adding localization support for Hebrew and Japanese
• Another big thanks to Tom Milewski⁠ for reducing our SVG size by 80% in our ClerkJS package, allowing us to reduce our bundle size even more.
• A thanks to DevelopedByEd for featuring us in his “My Ultimate tech stack 2023” video, check it out on YouTube⁠.

Resources

• Stable Support for Next.js 13.4: We are excited to announce that Clerk's app router support is now out of beta. Additionally, we've launched a significant update to our middleware.
• A <Component /> is Worth 1,000 APIs⁠: At Reactathon, Clerk’s CEO, Colin Sidoti⁠, discussed his belief that the future of technology is in components, not APIs.
• How We Roll: Passwords: We've initiated a new series that provides insight into our approach to building authentication at Clerk.
• Validating Clerk Tokens with Go⁠: Brian Morrison⁠ has shared a tutorial on how to validate Clerk tokens with Go in Netlify functions.

Stay tuned for future updates. If you have feedback or suggestions, leave us feedback on the docs (thank you Docsly⁠), tweet us at @ClerkDev⁠, or join the Clerk Community⁠ on Discord.

Change password flow

We introduced a new Change password flow this week, that allows the user to change their password and log out all sessions via our user profile component.

Bulk Organization invitations

You can now bulk invite users to an organization via Clerk's API allowing you to invite a whole team quickly.

You can specify a different role for each invited organization member. New organization invitations get a "pending" status until they are revoked by an organization administrator or accepted by the invitee.

The request body supports passing an optional redirect_url parameter for each invitation. When the invited user clicks the link to accept the invitation, they will be redirected to the provided URL.

Use this parameter to implement a custom invitation acceptance flow. You must specify the ID of the user that will send the invitation with the inviter_user_id parameter.

Each invitation can have a different inviter user. Inviter users must be members with administrator privileges in the organization. Only "admin" members can create organization invitations.

Below is a simplified version

curl -XPOST -H "Content-type: application/json" -d '[
  {
    "email_address": "string",
    "inviter_user_id": "string",
    "role": "admin",
    "public_metadata": {},
    "private_metadata": {},
    "redirect_url": "string"
  }
]' 'https://api.clerk.com/v1/organizations/{organization_id}/invitations/bulk'

Check out our backend API reference for more details: https://clerk.com/docs/reference/backend-api/tag/Organization-Invitations#operation/CreateOrganizationInvitationBulk

Hosted Pages

We have added a dedicated section for our hosted pages in the Clerk dashboard. You can find them under customization, this will give you links to preview hosted pages as well as a way to customize some of the look and feel.

Community shoutouts

This week I'd like to highlight a few community creators who created some informative videos on using Clerk!

First up we have Hamed Bahram who created a video on protecting your e-commerce website using Clerk, this 30 minute tutorial shows the power of Clerk from client to server.

Secondly Elias Wambugu who's channel is know as The Source Code gives you a introduction into Clerk with React in just 10 minutes!

This week, the team has been improving the DX of Clerk and introducing some important features.

Expo 48 Support

Clerk now has full support for Expo 48 with this change we introduced a brand new hook called useOAuth this hook dramatically improves the developer experience. Here are two examples of the code to handle Discord OAuth, both handle account transfers.

Before

import { useSignUp, useSignIn } from '@clerk/clerk-expo'
import React from 'react'
import { Button, View } from 'react-native'

import * as AuthSession from 'expo-auth-session'

const SignInWithOAuth = () => {
  const { isLoaded, signIn, setSession } = useSignIn()
  const { signUp } = useSignUp()
  if (!isLoaded) return null

  const handleSignInWithDiscordPress = async () => {
    try {
      const redirectUrl = AuthSession.makeRedirectUri({
        path: '/oauth-native-callback',
      })

      await signIn.create({
        strategy: 'oauth_discord',
        redirectUrl,
      })

      const {
        firstFactorVerification: { externalVerificationRedirectURL },
      } = signIn

      if (!externalVerificationRedirectURL)
        throw 'Something went wrong during the OAuth flow. Try again.'

      const authResult = await AuthSession.startAsync({
        authUrl: externalVerificationRedirectURL.toString(),
        returnUrl: redirectUrl,
      })

      if (authResult.type !== 'success') {
        throw 'Something went wrong during the OAuth flow. Try again.'
      }

      // Get the rotatingTokenNonce from the redirect URL parameters
      const { rotating_token_nonce: rotatingTokenNonce } = authResult.params

      await signIn.reload({ rotatingTokenNonce })

      const { createdSessionId } = signIn

      if (createdSessionId) {
        // If we have a createdSessionId, then auth was successful
        await setSession(createdSessionId)
      } else {
        // If we have no createdSessionId, then this is a first time sign-in, so
        // we should process this as a signUp instead
        // Throw if we're not in the right state for creating a new user
        if (!signUp || signIn.firstFactorVerification.status !== 'transferable') {
          throw 'Something went wrong during the Sign up OAuth flow. Please ensure that all sign up requirements are met.'
        }

        console.log(
          "Didn't have an account transferring, following through with new account sign up",
        )

        // Create user
        await signUp.create({ transfer: true })
        await signUp.reload({
          rotatingTokenNonce: authResult.params.rotating_token_nonce,
        })
        await setSession(signUp.createdSessionId)
      }
    } catch (err) {
      console.log(JSON.stringify(err, null, 2))
      console.log('error signing in', err)
    }
  }

  return (
    <View className="rounded-lg border-2 border-gray-500 p-4">
      <Button title="Sign in with Discord" onPress={handleSignInWithDiscordPress} />
    </View>
  )
}

export default SignInWithOAuth

After

import { useOAuth } from '@clerk/clerk-expo'
import React from 'react'
import { Button, View } from 'react-native'
import { useWarmUpBrowser } from '../hooks/useWarmUpBrowser'

const SignInWithOAuth = () => {
  useWarmUpBrowser()

  const { startOAuthFlow } = useOAuth({ strategy: 'oauth_discord' })

  const handleSignInWithDiscordPress = React.useCallback(async () => {
    try {
      const { createdSessionId, signIn, signUp, setActive } = await startOAuthFlow()
      if (createdSessionId) {
        setActive({ session: createdSessionId })
      } else {
        // Modify this code to use signIn or signUp to set this missing requirements you set in your dashboard.
        throw new Error('There are unmet requirements, modifiy this else to handle them')
      }
    } catch (err) {
      console.log(JSON.stringify(err, null, 2))
      console.log('error signing in', err)
    }
  }, [])

  return (
    <View className="rounded-lg border-2 border-gray-500 p-4">
      <Button title="Sign in with Discord" onPress={handleSignInWithDiscordPress} />
    </View>
  )
}

export default SignInWithOAuth

At this point we believe that our authentication offering is better than Expo's direct offer! If you are ready to get started with Expo and Clerk, check out our documentation

Improving our components

Many of our users offer email,username and phone as a way for their users to authenticate. In the past we would have a single input for all of the options and the user would have to type in their phone number including the country code which made it difficult

We now offer a way to switch the input allow the user to see a familiar phone input.

@clerk/nextjs runtime key support

We can now support keys at runtime for users who may have multiple projects under a single monorepo or want fine grain usage of keys.

export default withClerkMiddleware(
  (request: NextRequest) => {
    // pass the secret key to getAuth
    const { userId } = getAuth(req, {
      secretKey: 'CLERK_SECRET_KEY',
    })

    if (!userId) {
      // redirect the users to /pages/sign-in/[[...index]].ts

      const signInUrl = new URL('/sign-in', request.url)
      signInUrl.searchParams.set('redirect_url', request.url)
      return NextResponse.redirect(signInUrl)
    }
    return NextResponse.next()
  },
  {
    // pass the keys to Middleware
    secretKey: 'CLERK_SECRET_KEY',
  },
)

Create your organization with a slug

The <CreateOrganization/> component now exposes the slug field for you to input the slug you want when an organization is created. It is still optional and by default will use the name of the organization.

Dutch language support

We now have support for localization in Dutch thanks to a Clerk user who translated our components.

import { ClerkProvider } from '@clerk/nextjs'
import { nlNL } from '@clerk/localizations'
import type { AppProps } from 'next/app'

function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }: AppProps) {
  return (
    <ClerkProvider localization={nlNL} {...pageProps}>
      <Component {...pageProps} />
    </ClerkProvider>
  )
}

export default MyApp

Improved Web Vitals

This week we rolled out major changes to how Clerk's Javascript bundle is split and downloaded. Chances are you didn't notice anything, but your production application should be seeing ~10 points higher performance on pagespeed.web.dev⁠ than last week.

Official Chrome Extension Support

Use Clerk and React to building a Chrome extension. We've launched @clerk/chrome-extension⁠ on NPM, and a starter repository⁠ on GitHub to help kick off your next extension project.

OIDC Provider (beta)

With Clerk, your application can now serve as an Open ID Connect (OIDC) provider. Please reach out through Discord⁠ if you'd like to join the beta.

OIDC is a subset of OAuth2. In the future, Clerk will also enable your application to serve as a OAuth2 provider, including supporting grant flows with custom scopes.

Cross-Origin Embedder Policy Support for Profile Images

Clerk profile images are now served with the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header to enable embeds in applications with cross-origin embedder policies.

We raised $15m in our Series A led by Madrona

We are extremely excited to announce our Series A, this series A will allow us to continue focusing on the product you love and elevate user authentication for developers. If you want all the details check out our blog post written by Colin

Improved Email templates

Our email templates prior to this weeks release would delivery the user agent as part of the identifier at the bottom. We have updated this to now include the IP, and the location to make it easier for your end users to identify if they did request a login.

Organizations Dashboard Updates

We have added the organizations that a user belongs to, to the user's profile in the dashboard, allowing you to add additional organizations, and remove them as needed.

Community feature

This week Theo released a new video on creating the a fullstack Next.js application using TRPC, Typescript, Tailwind, Prisma and of course Clerk!

If you want to learn how to build a modern application with the best tools in under three hours this video is for you!

You can find us at clerk.com

You may have noticed, or maybe you didn't! We now are on clerk.com versus our old domain clerk.dev. This migration was a team effort all around as we made sure no one was interrupted as we moved to our new home.

Currently our clerk.dev website is redirecting to clerk.com, however in the future we want to do something with the domain. If you have any ideas, we loved to hear them!

Add additional OAuth scopes

We understand sometimes you need to elevate user scopes after a user is in your application, and sometimes it's based on the users roles or subscription status. This week we introduced a way to to request additional OAuth scopes, and show the user that attention is needed. Below are some examples of how to implement it.

User Button

If you are using our <UserButton/> component you can pass in the userProfileProps along with the provider and the additional scopes.

<UserButton
  userProfileProps={{
    additionalOAuthScopes: {
      twitch: ['user:read:follows'],
    },
  }}
/>

User Profile

If you are mounting the <UserProfile/> in your application you can pass the same props

<UserProfile
  additionalOAuthScopes={{
    twitch: ['user:read:follows'],
  }}
/>

Below is what a user will see when the need to reauthorize your new scopes.

Using the useUser hook

If you are using hooks and building our your own UIs you can use the useUser hook to make the user reauthorize.

const handleClick = async () => {
  if (!isLoaded || !isSignedIn) {
    return null
  }
  user.verifiedExternalAccounts
    .find((oauth) => oauth.provider === 'twitch')
    .reauthorize({
      additionalScopes: ['user:read:follows'],
      redirectUrl: '/protected',
    })
    .then((res) => {
      // open the URL in a new tab generated by Twitch
      window.open(res.verification?.externalVerificationRedirectURL)
    })
    .catch((err) => {
      console.log(err)
    })
}

Sign in with Linear

This had to be one of our biggest requested OAuth providers in the last few weeks, and it's finally here. You can now have your users log in using their linear account. Just enable it in the dashboard and start building!

Sign in with Spotify

We have supported Spotify for a while but it was something we manually enabled as it doesn't support our usual developer shared credentials. We have now opened this up so anyone with their own Spotify credentials can use it.

Beta Documentation Updates

I have been writing non stop since we last spoke, we have had great feedback from the community and that feedback has been rolled into the documentation.

Just today I introduced the Expo quickstart guide, this quickstart guide covers:

• Using ClerkProvider
• Custom sign up (email and password) with email verification.
• Custom sign in (email and password)
• OAuth with transfers (sign in or sign up with a single click
• How to sign a user out
• Using a token cache
• Read session & user data

You can check out all the new updates at https://clerk.com/docs