Clerk Auth Redirect/Reload Loop

I am currently looking into alternative forms of user authorization and authentication. Among the solutions I am looking into is Clerk. It’s pretty sweet and has a lot of cool features baked in. (Although the MFA support is a premium add-on and they aren’t super upfront about that).

One of the issues I ran into while implementing Clerk was a redirect loop. I set my home page within the Clerk Dashboard and when I reloaded my app, boom REDIRECTION FOR DAYS. Clerk was continuing to reload the home page for all eternity.

So, I added an onbeforeunload event into the page with a debugger call inside of it. This paused the page in the inspector before it reloaded and allowed me to actually see what was going on.

It turns out that Clerk was outputting an error message into the console. This error message is pictured below:

Clerk Error Message in JS Console

The <SignUp/> and <SignIn/> components cannot render when a user is already signed in, unless the application allows multiple sessions. Since a user is signed in and this application only allows a single session, Clerk is redirecting to the Home URL instead. (This notice only appears in development)

? Clerk

Well – ok then. Clerk is redirecting to the Home URL (which is the one it’s already on) and causing a permanent redirect loop. It seems like this would be handled better by simply _not_ loading the SignIn or SignUp components should the conditions for their existence fail.

Hopefully this helps you out! You might consider making your home page and your sign in pages different pages, or conditionally load those components, so that Clerk can be happy and not mess things up.

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