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In some cases it would be useful to perform session handling like this in nginx. I like the idea of building a reverse proxy which handles authentication and sessions, in front of a backend web page which wasn't designed to handle it. Something like giving access to an old internal intranet without having to change the app.

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this reminds me of a government agency that permits access by IP addresses whitelisted in IIS. Can't put fancy caching or load balancing in front because it can't understand X-Forwarded-For, etc.

tl;dr build your authentication into your app, not the web server layer.

There are plenty of upsides to decoupling authentication from your app codebases. For instance, in an enterprise where you have a single sign-on solution implemented as a web server module and a mix of third party and bespoke web apps.

I think no one argues that decoupling isn't the way, in fact that's exactly what others are saying too, but in the proper way. Make an authentication (micro)service and call it from your webapp. Proxy should proxy, auth service should manage (and cache, keep up to date) credentials, role associations and group memberships, web app should serve web pages (based on the business logic coded into it).

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