Integrating With Clerk

Clerk is a comprehensive authentication and user management platform, providing both APIs and pre-made UI components.

Set up Clerk

First, follow Clerk's quick start guides to set up your project.

Adjust your ZModel

Since Clerk manages both user authentication and storage, you don't need to store users in your database anymore. However, you still need to provide a type that the auth() function can resolve to. Instead of using a regular model, we can declare a type instead:

You can include any field you want in the User type, as long as you provide the same set of fields in the context object used for creating the enhanced Prisma client.

The following code shows an example blog post schema:

type User {
  id String @id
}

model Post {
  id String @id @default(cuid())
  createdAt DateTime @default(now())
  updatedAt DateTime @updatedAt
  title String
  published Boolean @default(false)
  authorId String // stores Clerk's user ID

  // author has full access
  @@allow('all', auth() != null && auth().id == authorId)

  // logged-in users can view published posts
  @@allow('read', auth() != null && published)
}

If you choose to synchronize user data to your database, you can define User as a regular model since it's then backed by a database table.

Create an enhanced Prisma client

You can create an enhanced Prisma client that automatically validates access policies, field validation rules, etc., during CRUD operations. For more details, please refer to ZModel Language reference.

To create such a client with a standard setup, call the enhance API with a regular Prisma client and the current user (fetched from Clerk). Here's an example:

Next.js App Router

import { enhance } from '@zenstackhq/runtime';
import { auth } from "@clerk/nextjs/server";
import { prisma } from '../lib/db';

async function getPrisma() {
  const authObject = await auth();
  // create a wrapper of Prisma client that enforces access policy
  return enhance(prisma, {
    user: authObject.userId ? { id: authObject.userId } : undefined,
  });
}

Next.js Pages Router

import type { NextApiRequest } from 'next';
import { enhance } from '@zenstackhq/runtime';
import { getAuth } from '@clerk/nextjs/server';
import { prisma } from '../lib/db';

async function getPrisma(req: NextApiRequest) {
  const auth = getAuth(req);
  // create a wrapper of Prisma client that enforces access policy
  return enhance(prisma, { user: auth ? { id: auth.userId } : undefined });
}

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You can find a working sample project for Next.js here. Use the "main" branch for app router, and the "pages-router" branch for pages router.

Check out this blog post for a more sophisticated multi-tenant setup.