authentication

name	authentication
description	How auth works in agent-native apps. Use when wiring login/signup, configuring auth modes, setting up organizations, protecting routes, or debugging session issues.
scope	dev
metadata	{"internal":true}

Authentication

Rule

Auth is powered by Better Auth with account-first design. Every new user creates an account on first visit. Use getSession(event) to authenticate custom routes; actions are auto-protected. Normal app HTML and React Router page-data responses are one impersonal, public-cacheable shell for every visitor. The client decides whether to render private UI or redirect to sign-in.

Auth Modes

Mode	Behavior
Development (default)	Real Better Auth — same flow as production. There is no auth bypass. On first run the framework auto-creates a throwaway dev account and signs you in without printing its credentials (disable with AGENT_NATIVE_DISABLE_AUTO_DEV_ACCOUNT=1), so you are not stuck at a login wall. getSession() returns the signed-in user or null — it never falls back to a sentinel identity.
Production (default)	Magic-link-first Better Auth when outbound email is ready, with email/password fallback and social providers (Google, GitHub). Organizations built in.
AUTH_MODE=local	Not a browser auth bypass, and never returns local@localhost. It only affects CLI/agent identity: it lets pnpm action / the local agent loop auto-bind to the single real signed-in dev user from the sessions table (see scripts/dev-session.ts). Browser login is unchanged.
AUTH_SKIP_EMAIL_VERIFICATION=1	QA/preview escape hatch for password-fallback accounts. Signup skips email verification and does not send the signup verification email. Local dev/test skips verification by default; set AUTH_SKIP_EMAIL_VERIFICATION=0 only when testing verification itself. It does not change magic-link delivery. Use +qa emails for test accounts.
AUTH_MAGIC_LINK=0	Force the email/password fallback even when outbound email is ready.
AUTH_DISABLED=true	Skip login/signup entirely — every request runs as [e-mail]. For local dev, cloud previews, and internal demos only; not for production with real users.
ACCESS_TOKEN / ACCESS_TOKENS	Static bearer fallback for MCP/connect clients that cannot use OAuth. Not browser auth and never a token login page.
Custom	Pass your own getSession to autoMountAuth(app, { getSession }).

Never use local@localhost as a fallback identity in app code (getRequestUserEmail() ?? "local@localhost", session?.email ?? "local@localhost", etc.). There is no dev auth shim. That pattern pools every unauthenticated request into one shared tenant and caused the 2026-04-29 credentials leak. When there is no session, throw or return 401 — never substitute a sentinel. Enforced by scripts/guard-no-localhost-fallback.mjs.

Remote MCP OAuth

Every app's /mcp endpoint is also a standard protected MCP resource. OAuth-capable hosts connect with the remote MCP URL only, receive a WWW-Authenticate challenge, discover /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource and /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server, then use a validated Client ID Metadata Document when the client id is an HTTPS URL or dynamically register a public client otherwise. URL-like client ids never fall back to dynamic registration when their metadata is missing or invalid. Clients complete authorization-code + PKCE at /mcp/oauth/authorize / /mcp/oauth/token. Access tokens are audience-bound to the exact MCP URL and carry user/org identity plus mcp:read, mcp:write, mcp:apps, and/or offline_access; advertising offline_access lets hosts such as ChatGPT retain refresh access. Refresh tokens are stored hashed and rotate. Keep ACCESS_TOKEN and pnpm exec agent-native connect for local stdio proxying and fallback clients. The CLI uses the OAuth-native URL-only entry for Claude Code/Claude Code CLI by default; use the Connect page or npx @agent-native/core@latest connect --token <token> when a client needs explicit bearer headers.

Local → Real Account Migration

Upgrading from local@localhost to a real account preserves SQL-backed workspace data. The built-in migration moves application_state, user-scoped settings, oauth_tokens, and any template table that uses owner_email.

Templates with legacy global settings can provide POST /api/local-migration for one-time re-homing during the upgrade flow.

Organizations

Organizations are framework-managed, not handled by Better Auth's organization plugin (which is intentionally NOT registered). Org data lives in the framework's own organizations, org_members, and org_invitations tables. Every app supports creating orgs, inviting members, and role-based access (owner/admin/member).

Owners and admins can require Google sign-in for an organization from Team settings or PUT /_agent-native/org/auth-provider with { provider: "google" }. Enabling it revokes current Better Auth and legacy sessions; password signup, password login, and non-Google social sessions are rejected for that org.

The active org flows automatically: session.orgId — resolved by getOrgContext from org_members plus the user's active-org-id setting (not from a Better Auth session field) — → AGENT_ORG_ID → SQL scoping (see security skill).

When an authenticated user has no org memberships, the framework auto-creates a default org (named after the user) the first time getOrgContext runs. This keeps org-scoped templates from showing a manual "create organization" step. The auto-create path skips users with pending invites or a matching allowed_domain org so they can join the intended team instead. Set AUTO_CREATE_DEFAULT_ORG=0 only for deployments that intentionally want manual org creation.

App-Specific Roles

When a request needs "only some teammates may do this inside this app", the answer is per-app roles — not a second organization. App roles are an overlay on the one org membership, never a second roster. Three role systems coexist and never imply one another: the org role (org_members.role) says what a person may do to the team, an app role says what they may do inside one app, and a share role (sharing skill) says what they may do to one row. An app admin is not an org admin, and org handlers never read app roles.

Declare the vocabulary once on the server and guard actions with it:

import { defineAppRoles } from "@agent-native/core/org-team";

export const coachAccess = defineAppRoles({
  appId: "coach",
  roles: ["member", "coach-admin"] as const,
  defaultRole: "member",
});

// in an action
authorize: coachAccess.requireAny("coach-admin"),

Roles are an unordered set, not a ladder — declaration order carries no meaning, and every guard names its accepted roles explicitly. defaultRole is display only: requireAny matches an explicit assignment row and nothing else, so "nobody assigned this person" never reads as "granted", and widening the default cannot silently widen a guard. Org membership is a precondition, resolved in the same statement as the assignment, so a leftover assignment for a removed member can never authorize. Only org owners/admins may assign app roles; render the picker with <TeamPage appRoles={descriptor} />.

requireAny validates at definition time — no roles, or a role outside the declared vocabulary, throws when the module loads rather than surfacing as an unexplained 403 later. When calling resolve/assertAny directly, note that an explicit userEmail: null / orgId: null means "this run has no identity" and does not fall back to the ambient request context; only undefined does.

Stop And Confirm Before Creating Or Switching Organizations

Vault credentials are scoped per organization and are not shared between them. A second organization therefore orphans every key synced under the first, and the only symptom is a missing-credential error somewhere else entirely, naming the key rather than the org change that caused it.

So: do not create an organization, repoint anyone's active-org-id, or migrate a user/roster/identity list into a new organization on your own initiative. Stop, say plainly that it will orphan the existing organization's credentials, and get an explicit yes first — even when the user asked for something that seems to imply it ("use the real org user list", "align this to the Settings team view", "migrate my users").

The intended pattern is one organization per workspace, with every app sharing it. When a request needs real org members, add them to the existing organization; never provision a parallel one per app. createOrganization() logs a loud warning when it creates an additional org for an account that already belongs to one, and setActiveOrgId() logs one whenever it moves an account from one org to another, naming both orgs and the orphaned credentials. Treat either warning as a bug report against your own change, not as noise.

Write active-org-id only through setActiveOrgId(email, orgId, reason) from @agent-native/core (src/org/active-org.ts). Calling putUserSetting(email, "active-org-id", ...) directly is how a roster migration silently repointed 21 accounts with nothing in the logs; the helper exists so that cannot happen again.

Do not wrap normal app shells in <RequireActiveOrg> just to force setup. Use non-blocking org UI such as InvitationBanner, OrgSwitcher, and a /team route so users can accept invites, join domain-matched teams, or switch orgs without blocking the primary product experience. Place org UI inside the agent sidebar so the setup checklist, chat, and CLI stay usable during setup.

A2A Identity

Set A2A_SECRET (same value) on all apps that must verify each other's identity.

• Outbound A2A calls are signed with JWTs
• Inbound calls are verified cryptographically
• Without A2A_SECRET, A2A calls are unauthenticated (fine for local dev)

Cross-App SSO (Dispatch identity hub)

Each hosted *.agent-native.com app has its own user store, so "sign in once" is identity federation, not a shared cookie. Dispatch is the identity authority.

• Opt-in per app via one env var: set AGENT_NATIVE_IDENTITY_HUB_URL=https://dispatch.agent-native.com and the app shows a "Sign in with Agent-Native" option. Unset = zero behavior change — the whole path is dormant. Reversible at any time.
• Flow: the app creates a bound state and PKCE verifier, then opens GET <hub>/_agent-native/identity/authorize?response_type=code&app=&client_id=&redirect_uri=&state=&code_challenge=. Dispatch authenticates the human and redirects back with only a short-lived, one-time authorization code. The app keeps the verifier in a callback-scoped HttpOnly cookie and redeems the code server-to-server at /_agent-native/identity/token; only that response contains the short-lived A2A_SECRET-signed identity assertion. No bearer token or JWT is placed in a browser URL. Canonical clients require an exact registered app ID, client ID, origin, and callback path; localhost remains available for development. The app verifies the assertion, JIT-links strictly by verified email (existing same-email user → reused unchanged; new email → created), then mints a normal local session.
• Invariant (do not break): identity rows are only ever added — never modified, renamed, or deleted. Enabling SSO logs users out, but they always log back into the same email-matched account with data intact. Email is the only thing that crosses the trust boundary; the app never trusts a user id, role, or org from the wire.
• Canary rollout: deploy with the env unset everywhere (no-op) → set it on one app (mail) only → verify (logout → SSO → Dispatch → back to the same pre-existing account, data intact, direct logins still work) → expand app-by-app → rollback = unset the env on that app's deploy (instant, no data change).

Packaged Desktop workspace sign-in

For canonical first-party hosted apps, the packaged Desktop SSO Canary may compose the same federation into one workspace sign-in. Dispatch owns the default-off desktop.workspace-sso availability flag; every app still owns its local session. One explicit Settings action opens one interactive Dispatch ceremony, then provisions every currently eligible app. Later eligible webviews are provisioned lazily when they load. The flag is never an auth or authorization boundary. Keep nonce, signature, exact origin/callback, authenticated-session, app-binding, cookie allowlist, revocation, and credential-custody checks unconditional. When the flag is Off or unreadable, Desktop must leave ordinary per-app sign-in, sign-out, and Settings unchanged. Never extend the broker to arbitrary third-party sites, and never expose cookies, identity tokens, or provider credentials through IPC. Canonical hosted apps recognize packaged Desktop requests without per-app identity-hub environment configuration. A custom workspace app is eligible only when its Desktop config explicitly sets workspaceSso: true, its production origin is exact HTTPS, and Dispatch has an exact registration in IDENTITY_SSO_APP_REGISTRY_JSON with its app ID, client ID, callback path, and identity-sso capability. The custom app also needs AGENT_NATIVE_IDENTITY_HUB_URL=https://dispatch.agent-native.com and the shared A2A_SECRET. Ordinary browsers and self-hosted apps still require the explicit hub configuration. Stable Desktop builds must not initialize the broker until a later release is separately approved. Treat the Canary user-agent marker only as an availability hint, never as remote attestation or an authentication boundary. Bind supervised acceptance to exact signed-artifact provenance. The Canary must not intercept anonymous app sign-in navigation. The user explicitly chooses workspace sign-in in Desktop Settings for the active eligible app; ordinary app sign-in remains the default path. A failed app fan-out is reported as incomplete and can be retried; Desktop must not claim workspace sign-in is complete until every eligible app in that snapshot succeeds.

Full runbook + flow detail: Cross-App SSO doc.

Builder Browser Access

Apps can connect to Builder via the cli-auth flow and persist shared browser credentials in .env. Agents then use the built-in get-browser-connection tool to provision a real browser session via AI Services.

Protecting Custom Routes

Actions are auto-protected. Do not create custom /api/ routes for normal CRUD, data queries, or action-backed operations; use defineAction and the auto-mounted action endpoint instead. If a route-only concern forces a custom route:

import { getSession } from "@agent-native/core/server";

export default defineEventHandler(async (event) => {
  const session = await getSession(event);
  if (!session) throw createError({ statusCode: 401 });
  // ...
});

Never create unprotected routes that modify data.

Sign-In from a Public Page

For public pages (share links, embeds, marketing pages) that need anonymous viewers to sign in and return to where they were, navigate them through the framework's sign-in entry point — never roll your own:

const ret = window.location.pathname + window.location.search;
window.location.href =
  "/sign-in?return=" + encodeURIComponent(ret);

After successful sign-in (token / email-password / Google OAuth), the framework redirects to return. The path is validated as same-origin via the URL parser — open-redirect / header-injection inputs fall back to /.

Bookmarked private paths work through the client session gate: the shared shell hydrates, AppProviders redirects the signed-out visitor to the framework sign-in entrypoint with the current path as return, and successful sign-in sends them back.

Gating the App Shell (avoid the logged-out infinite spinner)

Normal app HTML and React Router page-data responses deliberately bypass the server session guard. They are rendered impersonally and cached as one shared, public, hard-cached-at-the-CDN shell; APIs, actions, and framework data routes remain server-protected. The client session gate is therefore the authoritative decision point for whether private app UI renders.

Never, on the SSR HTML/.data path: set private, no-store, or Vary: Cookie; call getSession or read cookies in the SSR route or the login HTML path; or embed tokens/secrets into the rendered HTML — a token-bearing page still returns the same anonymous shell and resolves access client-side. This has regressed repeatedly (agents "fixing" it back to per-user SSR); it is enforced by guard:ssr-cache-shell and ssr-handler.spec.ts (packages/core/src/server/ssr-handler.ts), and reverts will be rejected.

AppProviders applies RequireSession automatically on its private branch. It resolves the session on the client and redirects signed-out visitors to /sign-in?return=… before mounting the routed shell. The legacy /_agent-native/sign-in path remains supported for older generated apps and bookmarks:

import { AppProviders } from "@agent-native/core/client/hooks";

<AppProviders queryClient={queryClient}>
  <AppLayout>
    <Outlet />
  </AppLayout>
</AppProviders>;

• Keep the layout/outlet and always-mounted effects (poll, automation trigger) inside AppProviders so they do not fire 401s before the gate resolves.
• Pass sessionBypass to AppProviders only for a private-looking surface that authenticates by another mechanism (for example, an embed iframe carrying its own scoped token).
• Pass isPublicPath for public/anonymous and SEO routes. That branch does not mount RequireSession and SSRs real content.
• Use RequireSession directly only when a nested subtree needs custom redirect={false} / signedOut behavior.

Related Skills

• security — Data scoping, SQL injection, secrets
• actions — Auto-protected by the auth guard
• Cross-App SSO doc — Dispatch identity hub, federation flow, canary runbook