How to Add API Key Authentication to Next.js API Routes
Introduction
You add an API key check to one route. A secret in .env, a header comparison, a 401if it fails. Ship it, move on.
Six months later, that same block is copy-pasted across 12 route handlers. You rotate the key and miss a file; now one route is broken in production. A new developer adds an endpoint and forgets the check entirely. You need to cut off one consumer’s access and realize the only way to do it is to rotate the key for everyone. And somewhere in that history, the secret got committed to a branch that’s now public.
None of these are bugs you wrote. They’re the natural consequence of where authentication lives: inside your route handlers, mixed with your business logic, owned by your application instead of a dedicated layer.
The cleaner path is to move auth out of your application and into an API gateway....
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