System overview

If you’ve got this far, you’re probably aware that Prefactor can help you build authentication into your app. (If this is news to you, our website has more information.) Jumping down a level, it’s time to get into a bit more detail.

There are five major components of Prefactor, outlined below.

Authentication UI

The experience your users will get when logging into your app. Your app doesn’t directly interact with this component — you kick off the process by using the OAuth API discussed below.

Using that API, your app will redirect to Prefactor and the user will complete an authentication flow. When that is complete, the system will redirect back to your app.

This UI is fully hosted on our infrastructure — you don’t need to build anything into your app.

Admin UI

This is your backend interface for user management and configuration. We’ll take a closer look shortly.

OAuth API

Prefactor implements OAuth 2, specifically the OpenID Connect standard. The advantage of doing this is that libraries are widely available.

However, OAuth implementations do vary between providers; the protocol has evolved over time, and each platform has its own quirks. This is where Prefactor can help: rather than dealing with each of those integrations separately, you only need to integrate once with Prefactor. Over time as we build out our SDKs, the integration will become even simpler.

Once the authentication flow is complete, you’ll have a Prefactor user ID and some other information that you can use in your app. A minimal integration can be very straightforward to implement.

Admin API

This gives you access to all the same capabilities you get in the Admin UI, and a few more. This allows you to integrate your app more deeply, and potentially automate some aspects.

Command-line interface

This wraps up the Admin API and lets you complete admin tasks directly from your terminal.