Accessing clerk from ruby

Lets see how we can interact with clerk from the backend, and what we'll need to do to both do batch jobs off of it, as well as how we could deploy a sinatra-based API that using JWT claims to process requests from statically build and deployed client side sites.

Talking to the clerk back end from ruby

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  bundle init
  bundle add clerk-sdk-ruby dotenv

Put your CLERK_SECRET_KEY into .env.

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  # users.rb
  require 'dotenv/load'
  require 'clerk'

  clerk = Clerk::SDK.new

  # List all users
  clerk.users.all

  # Get your first user
  user = clerk.users.all(limit: 1).first

  # Print it if you want
  # require 'pp'
  # pp user


  # Look up a user given their id

  puts "Looking up user #{user['id']}"
  user = clerk.users.find( user['id'] )

  puts user['email_addresses'].first['email_address']

Adding clerk jwt support to sinatra

Start with https://github.com/wschenk/sinatra-ar-template so we are on the same page.

Add

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  bundle add jwt dotenv clerk-sdk-ruby

Put your CLERK_SECRET_KEY into .env if you haven't already.

In app.rb add cors support and the environment variables.

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  require 'dotenv/load'

  # ...

  before do
    response.headers['Access-Control-Allow-Origin'] = '*'
    response.headers['Access-Control-Allow-Methods'] = 
      'GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS'
    response.headers['Access-Control-Allow-Headers'] =
      'Authorization, Content-Type, Accept, X-User-Email, X-Auth-Token'
  end

  options '*' do
    response.headers['Allow'] = 'GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS'
    200
  end

Replace the auth_check in accounts.rb to:

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    def auth_check
    clerk = Clerk::SDK.new(api_key: ENV.fetch('CLERK_SECRET_KEY', nil))

    token = extract_token_from_header

    if token
      begin
        decoded_token = Clerk::SDK.new.verify_token(token)
        puts decoded_token
        user_id = decoded_token['sub']
        puts "Valid JWT token found for user_id: #{user_id}"
        return yield
      rescue JWT::DecodeError
        puts 'Invalid JWT token'
      end
    end

    return yield if session[:account_id]

    halt 403, { access: :denied }.to_json
  end

  def extract_token_from_header
    auth_header = request.env['HTTP_AUTHORIZATION']
    auth_header&.start_with?('Bearer ') ? auth_header.split(' ').last : nil
  end

Calling the sinatra app from vanilla javascript

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  const token = await clerk.session?.getToken();

  if (!token) {
    setResponse("Error: Unable to get authentication token");
    return;
  }

  const response = await fetch("http://localhost:9292/private", {
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Bearer ${token}`,
    },
  });

  const data = await response.json();
  console.log(data);

Accessing clerk from ruby

backends dont matter

Contents

Talking to the clerk back end from ruby

Adding clerk jwt support to sinatra

Calling the sinatra app from vanilla javascript

References

Using clerk with vite and static site

Maybe we don’t really want all of that nextjs

vite-bundle-visualizer

why is my build so big