How to Fix LinkedIn Authentication in NextAuth.js: A Custom Provider Setup Guide

A Quick Guide to Getting LinkedIn OAuth Working Correctly

LinkedIn authentication is a powerful feature to add to your Next.js application using NextAuth.js, but the default configuration can often lead to issues — especially when trying to fetch user details like email, name, and profile picture.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how I solved this issue by customizing the LinkedIn provider configuration in NextAuth.js.

🧪 The Problem

Using the default LinkedInProvider setup from next-auth/providers/linkedin may not always return complete user information such as email or profile picture.

🔧 Default Implementation

import LinkedInProvider from "next-auth/providers/linkedin";

providers: [
  LinkedInProvider({
    clientId: process.env.LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID,
    clientSecret: process.env.LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET,
  })
]

This basic setup often results in incomplete data being returned from LinkedIn.

✅ The Fix

To overcome this, I had to dig into LinkedIn’s OAuth docs and customize the LinkedInProvider to manually specify scopes, endpoints, and userinfo configurations.

💡 Working LinkedInProvider Configuration

LinkedInProvider({
  clientId: process.env.LINKEDIN_CLIENT_ID ?? "",
  clientSecret: process.env.LINKEDIN_CLIENT_SECRET ?? "",
  client: { token_endpoint_auth_method: "client_secret_post" },
  scope: "r_liteprofile r_emailaddress",
  issuer: "https://www.linkedin.com",
  userinfo: {
    url: "https://api.linkedin.com/v2/userinfo",
  },
  token: {
    url: "https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/accessToken",
  },
  wellKnown: "https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/.well-known/openid-configuration",
  authorization: {
    url: "https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/authorization",
    params: {
      scope: "profile email openid",
      prompt: "consent",
      access_type: "offline",
      response_type: "code",
    },
  },
  jwks_endpoint: "https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/openid/jwks",
  async profile(profile) {
    return {
      id: profile.sub,
      name: profile.name,
      firstname: profile.given_name,
      lastname: profile.family_name,
      email: profile.email,
      image: profile.picture,
    };
  },
}),

This configuration ensures you:

• Request proper scopes like r_emailaddress
• Use the correct LinkedIn OAuth endpoints
• Get a complete profile object including email and picture

🔐 Bonus Tip: Twitter Provider Email Issue

If you're using Twitter authentication as well, make sure you enable email access in your Twitter app settings. Without this, you won’t get the user’s email address.

TwitterProvider({
  clientId: process.env.TWITTER_CLIENT_ID,
  clientSecret: process.env.TWITTER_CLIENT_SECRET,
})

✅ Tip: Enable "Request email address from users" in Twitter Developer Portal.

🧵 TL;DR

• Default LinkedInProvider doesn’t return complete user info.
• Customize it with the right OAuth config to fix it.
• Twitter requires email permission to return user emails.

Thanks for reading! 🚀

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Let me know if you’ve faced similar issues or need help with OAuth in your apps! 💬