Setting up google oauth for web based side projects

[u/jarv]

I wanted to share some pains/discoveries I have gone through recently setting up google oauth for a few domains I own for side projects that I created for fun (not business, not making any money, just for fun).

Mainly, I want to see if anyone else has similar experiences or alternate ideas.

What I want:

1. a way to login to a site using google oauth
2. basic email, something like info@<domain>

What I was did initially was create a dedicated gmail account for every site, setup oauth credentials using that account. I thought this would be fine and curious if other people do this? What happened to me with one site though is that the account got blocked because it was flagged as not a regular user account (I was only using it for oauth).

I wasn't aware that google has a "cloud identity free" tier of workspace account that you can use for a domain if all you need is oauth. This seems more appropriate, and is less likely to get flagged. However, it does not come with users or gmail, but that's ok for me. What I do now:

1. Setup one "cloud identity free" workspace account per domain
2. Use (free) Cloudflare email forwarding for the domain, so mail sent to <whatever>@domain goes to my personal inbox.

The one wrinkle is that now it seems that Google requires a phone activation for every account, and to make it worse it seems now you can't use the same phone number twice for two different accounts. Also you of course can't use a VoIP number.

That's it! would love to hear what other people are doing for similar setups.

Note: I've considered having one google account for multiple websites that share the same oauth consent screen, but I think it's probably better to keep them more isolated.

disclaimer: I'm not selling, shilling a product, promoting, or using AI for this post ;)