Chapter 11: Creating Authenticated Experiences

Within the context of this book, authentication is the act of verifying that a user is who they say they are within a website. Once their identity has been verified, we can show the individual content that's only meant for them. This might be their profile page, delivery address, bank details, and more. In this chapter, we're going to focus more on how to implement routing for use with authentication services instead of focusing on how to implement authentication services or what content to display when a user is authenticated. We will remind ourselves of how this is done in traditional React applications before applying this knowledge to Gatsby sites with two different client-side implementations.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Routing and authentication in React applications
• Authentication using client-only routes within Gatsby
• Site-wide authentication using context within Gatsby
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