// the take
A reference implementation of Firebase authentication in a React app, built as the companion code for Robin Wieruch's 'Road to React' tutorial series. It covers the full auth surface: sign up/in/out, password reset and change, email verification, protected and role-based routes, and social logins via Google, Facebook and Twitter. It's aimed at developers learning the Firebase Auth APIs and React patterns around them, not at teams looking for a maintained starter kit.
The feature list is genuinely complete for an auth boilerplate — social login linking, role-based authorization, and auth persistence are all implemented, not just stubbed. It includes real Firebase Realtime Database security rules in the README, which is the part most tutorials skip and most apps get wrong. The withAuthentication/withAuthorization/withEmailVerification HOC split is a clean illustration of composing cross-cutting auth concerns in React.
Last pushed in 2022 and built on create-react-app (now deprecated and unmaintained) and an old react-router-4 API — both would need a real migration before use in a new project. It uses the Firebase Realtime Database rather than Firestore, which Firebase itself steers new projects away from. The project is dual-licensed (commercial license required for proprietary use, GPLv3 otherwise), which is an unusual and easy-to-miss constraint for something that looks like a free boilerplate. Travis CI and Greenkeeper, both referenced in the README, are dead services, so the CI/dependency-update tooling shown no longer functions.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →