Passkey quickstart guide

Passlock abstracts much of the complexity associated with passkeys. You should be able to add passkey authentication to your web app in less than 30 minutes.

Prerequisites

Passlock is framework agnostic. For this guide we won’t assume any particular framework. We’ll focus on the Passlock libraries. We assume you understand your chosen framework.

Most modern browsers now suport passkeys, so support should not be an issue. The underlying WebAuthn APIs require client side Javascript, so if you need to support browsers that have Javascript disabled you’ll need to fallback to another mechanism.

We assume your frontend uses a bundler with tree shaking support (Vite, Webpack etc.)

Your backend can be coded in pretty much any language and framework. We offer a framework agnostic JS/TS server library, which is what we’ll use in this guide. If you’re not using a JS backend, dont worry - we’ll also show you how to verify passkeys using REST calls.

Installation

The only library you need is the Passlock client library. Install it in your frontend project:

npm

npm i @passlock/client

pnpm

pnpm add @passlock/client

yarn

yarn add @passlock/client

If you’re running a NodeJS backend we recommend installing this library:

npm

npm i @passlock/node

pnpm

pnpm add @passlock/node

yarn

yarn add @passlock/node

Setup

We’ll create a (free) Passlock cloud instance for this tutorial:

npm

npx @passlock/cli init

pnpm

pnpx @passlock/cli init

yarn

yarn dlx @passlock/cli init

The script will ask for your first name, last name and email. Make sure you have access to the email account as single use codes will be emailed here.

Follow the prompts and take a note of your Tenancy ID and API Key:

Tip

Your Passlock cloud instance includes three isolated “tenancies” (environments). We’re using the dev tenancy here. You can access all your tenancies in your Passlock console