Clerk + Magnolia CMS
How to use Magnolia and Clerk together
What Clerk offers
Clerk is a modern identity and user management platform built with developers in mind, designed to make authentication and user handling seamless in web and mobile applications. Unlike traditional identity providers, Clerk emphasizes developer experience by offering prebuilt UI components for login, sign-up, password reset, and multi-factor authentication. These components can be easily customized to match a brand’s look and feel, allowing teams to implement secure authentication flows quickly without building them from scratch.
The platform supports multiple authentication methods, including classic email and password login, social logins with providers such as Google, GitHub, and Facebook, as well as enterprise-ready options like SAML and OpenID Connect for single sign-on. Multi-factor authentication is natively supported and can be enabled to strengthen security, while Clerk also manages sessions, tokens, and secure cookies, reducing the complexity for developers and ensuring best practices are consistently applied.
Beyond authentication, Clerk provides comprehensive user management capabilities. Developers and administrators can manage user profiles, roles, and permissions in a centralized way, create user groups, and even offer self-service profile management so that users can update their own information. Its role and permission management features make it possible to define fine-grained access control rules that integrate directly into an application’s business logic.
Another key advantage is Clerk’s tight integration with modern development frameworks and hosting platforms. It offers SDKs and APIs for Next.js, React, Remix, Vue, and other popular ecosystems, making it simple to embed authentication and user features directly into applications. This combination of prebuilt components, robust APIs, and strong security practices makes Clerk a developer-friendly solution for building secure, scalable, and user-centric applications.
Add the SSO Module
To integrate login integration into Magnolia, the easiest way is to use the magnolia sso module. Enabling users to log into Magnolia using their existing identity infrastructure. Rather than replacing Magnolia’s internal security, it enhances it by relying on a trusted third-party identity source. When users authenticate via the external provider, their roles and group memberships are mapped to corresponding Magnolia roles, ensuring proper access control without managing credentials locally. It supports fallback to traditional Magnolia JCR-based login.