Changelog Jan 21, 2022

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.