Creating unauthenticated user

[universse]

Hi, I'm currently making sharing functionality for my site. Basically, a user can invite another user to edit/view his document via email. I'm modeling this using a many-to-many table.

If the email belongs to a signed up user, it's all good since I can look up the uid from auth.users using the email and add it to the junction table. However, for non-user, is there any way I can create an unauthenticated user in the auth.users table so that I can get an uid to insert into the junction table. Ideally, I would not have to create another table to track invites for non-user.

I tried inserting into auth.users directly (just id and email) but when signing up with the same email, an error is thrown.

code: 500
msg: "Database error saving new user"
error_id: "f66fd8c6-52f0-462c-a843-e938c0892dba"

How should I approach this?

[emschwartz]

Hi @universse,

I think the recommended way of doing this would be to create a public.users table that includes users created by Supabase Auth and unauthenticated users you'd create through this other mechanism. The Create a public.users table section of the docs describe this as well as how to set it up so entries (with the same ID) are automatically added to this table when new users are added to auth.users. You could have postgres generate a UUID for those unauthenticated users (though you'd admittedly need to merge the identifiers if a previously unauthenticated user signs up).

[universse]

Thank you for your response. I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to insert unauthenticated user to public.users table, since id is a foreign key, as suggested here. I guess I would have to create a separate table for tracking pending invites. 😃