Should I switch to Netlify for hosting my express node app? MySQL DB, Express Rest API, NextJS front (deployed with Netlify) - Netlify Identity auth

Support
,
1

I am working on a full stack app. Here’s my current stack.

NextJS frontend (deployed with Netlify) Express Node Rest API (deployed with Heroku) MySQL DB (ClearDB)

I recently switched to deploying my front end with Netlify because I liked the Netlify Identity feature. I need to add authentication to front end as well as my api routes and found that Netlify ID made it very easy to implement front end auth. However I still need to figure out how to add authentication to my API as I want to gate access to the database.

I want to use Netlify ID to auth my API. My understanding is that means I need my Express app to have access to Netlify ID context in order to consume user access tokens / JWTs. It seems to me that in order to pass that netlify id context to my api I have no choice but to use Netlify Functions within my project folder to house my Express app.

Currently my API supports standard get post put delete methods so I want to add auth to a handful of these specific functions.

Does this make sense? Please ask any question to help clarify. I’m at a pivotal point in my dev timeline and want to make the best decision.

2

There are two ways to do this:

  1. Use Netlify Functions to authenticate users and then send your requests to your Heroku backend.
  2. On Business plan, you can specify a custom JWT secret and use that secret to verify JWT directly on your backend.