I’m currently working on integrating Okta for Single Sign-On (SSO) in my application and would really appreciate some guidance or best practices to get started the right way.
My tech stack:
Frontend: React / Next.js
Backend: Node.js / Express
Auth requirement: SSO for internal users (email/password or company login via Okta)
I’ve already created a developer account on Okta and gone through some basic docs, but I’m still a bit confused about:
Proper flow for authentication using Okta (PKCE vs OAuth vs OpenID)
How to handle tokens on the client side securely
Setting up Okta groups or roles for access control
Best SDK or library to use for React or Node
If there’s any:
Sample repo
Step-by-step tutorial
Or someone here who’s done a similar integration and can share some advice
That would be super helpful
Thanks in advance! Looking forward to learning from this awesome community.
I can help you get started in connecting with Okta for authentication.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a tutorial or an example using Next.js yet, but there are other content we can share with you to help answer some of the questions you have.
For internal applications within your company, you’ll want to use OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect. PKCE is always recommended for applications with users signing in.
You can read more about OAuth, OIDC, and PKCE here
Your tech stack has some special requirements. Next.js uses SSR, so it can’t retain authentication context. This means you’ll need to delegate authentication serverside.
In Okta, you’ll create a Web OIDC application type because authenticate is handled in the backend. You can then use next-authjs. We do have a post that is a bit older demonstrating this concept you can use as reference
Another option is to add authentication handling to your backend directly. See the Backend for Frontend or Token Mediator. An example of this pattern can be found in this post
