Passkey quick start 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.

Most modern browsers now support passkeys. The underlying WebAuthn APIs require client-side JavaScript. 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, don’t worry - we’ll also show you how to verify passkeys using REST calls.

Installation

The only required library 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 Node.js backend we recommend installing this library:

npm

npm i @passlock/node

pnpm

pnpm add @passlock/node

yarn

yarn add @passlock/node

Setup

You’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. Follow the prompts and take 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