Building an Angular Passkey Login Page with TypeScript

1. Introduction

2. Prerequisites

3. Set up the Angular project

4. Repository structure

5. Set up the Corbado UI component for passkey authentication

    5.1 Set up your Corbado account and project

    5.2 Embed the UI component in your frontend

    5.3 Set up the profile page

    5.4 Add Corbado session management

    5.5 Run the application

6. Conclusion

1. Introduction

The final result of this tutorial looks as follows:

2. Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes basic familiarity with Angular, HTML, CSS and JavaScript / TypeScript. Lets dive in! Moreover, you need to have Node and NPM installed on your machine. To facilitate things and follow this tutorial, we recommend to install the Angular CLI as well:

npm install -g @angular/cli

3. Repository structure

Lets first discuss the structure of our project (full GitHub repo):

.
├── .angular
├── angular.json
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.app.json
├── tsconfig.json
├── tsconfig.spec.json
└── src
    ├── app
    │   ├── login
    │   │   ├── login.component.css
    │   │   ├── login.component.html
    │   │   ├── login.component.spec.ts    
    │   │   └── login.component.ts    
    │   ├── profile
    │   │   ├── profile.component.css
    │   │   ├── profile.component.html
    │   │   ├── profile.component.spec.ts    
    │   │   └── profile.component.ts   
    │   ├── app.component.html
    │   ├── app.component.ts
    │   ├── app.module.ts
    │   ├── app.component.css 
    │   └── app-routing.module.ts
    └── style.css

The rest of the files of this project can be ignored for the purpose of this tutorial.

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4. Set up the Angular project

In the following, we explain step-by-step what needs to be done to successfully set up the Angular project. If you want to see the finished code, please have a look at our sample application repository.

Lets start out by initializing a new Angular project. In this tutorial, we're using Angular version 15.2.9:

ng new passkeys-demo-angular

In the installation guide steps, we select the following:

• Share pseudonymous usage data: No
• Angular routing: Yes
• Stylesheet format: CSS
• Enable SSR: No (Choose yes if it's required for your application)

If you run

ng serve

the sample Angular skeleton application starts at http://localhost:4200.

5. Set up the Corbado UI component for passkey authentication

5.1 Set up your Corbado account and project

Visit the Corbado developer panel to sign up and create your account (you'll see the passkey sign-up in action here!).

In the project setup wizard, begin by selecting an appropriate name for your project. For the product selection, opt for "Corbado Complete". Subsequently, specify your technology stack and select "DEV along with "Corbado session management" options. Afterwards, youll get more foundational setup guidance.

Next, choose "Web app" as an application type and Vue as your framework. In the application settings, define your application url and relying party id as follows:

• Application URL: Provide the URL where you embedded the UI component, here: http://localhost:4200.
• Relying Party ID: Provide the domain (no protocol, no port and no path) where passkeys should be bound to, here: localhost

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5.2 Embed the UI component in the frontend

First, let's install all packages required for our implementation. Namly, this will include the Corbado web-js package as well as it's corresponding types and to fix some typescript issues, we'll also include react and ua-parser-js types.

npm i @corbado/web-js

npm i -D @corbado/types @types/react @types/ua-parser-js

Navigate to the root directory of the project:

cd passkeys-demo-angular

Retrieve your Corbado Project's ID, which we'll need in the following. You can find it here under Corbado API access.

Next, navigate to the app.component.ts file. We'll use it as a boundary to only render our app once the Corbado project has initialized.

import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';
import Corbado from "@corbado/web-js";
 
@Component({
    selector: 'app-root',
    templateUrl: './app.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent implements OnInit {
    title = 'passkeys-demo-angular';
    isInitialized = false;
 
    constructor() {
    }
 
    ngOnInit(): void {
        this.initialize();
    }
 
    async initialize() {
        try {
            await Corbado.load({
                projectId: "<Your Corbado Project ID>",
                darkMode: 'off'
            });
            this.isInitialized = true;
        } catch (error) {
            console.error('Initialization failed:', error);
        }
    }
}

Once our project has initialized, we'll set the corresponding state and in our App we'll conditionally render our router depending on this isInitialized state inside the `app.component.html file.

Most of the Corbado configuration can be done in the Corbado.load call. An extensive list can be found here.

Replace all content with the following:

<ng-container *ngIf="isInitialized">
    <router-outlet></router-outlet>
</ng-container>

Next, we create two new components, one where we display our passkey login UI component and one that displays basic user information after we have successfully authenticated.

ng generate component login
ng generate component profile

Open src/app/app-routing.module.ts and add the routes for the login and profile component. The login component should be reachable at http://localhost:4200, while the profile component is reachable at http://localhost:4200/profile:

// src/app/app-routing.module.ts
 
import { NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { ProfileComponent } from "./profile/profile.component";
import { RouterModule, Routes } from "@angular/router";
import { LoginComponent } from "./login/login.component";
 
const routes: Routes = [
    { path: 'profile', component: ProfileComponent },
    { path: 'login', component: LoginComponent },
    { path: '', component: LoginComponent },
    { path: '**', redirectTo: '/' }
]
 
@NgModule({
    imports: [
        RouterModule.forRoot(routes)
    ],
    exports: [RouterModule]
})
export class AppRoutingModule {
}

Let's now set up our auth page. For this we'll need a reference to a div element on our page, which should be used to inject the auth UI into. We establish this reference with Angular ViewChild decorator. After the view has initialized, we'll use the global Corbado object again to mount the auth UI and define a callback to be executed once the user has successfully logged in or signed up. In our case, we'll redirect to the /profile page. Let's set this up in our login.component.ts file.

import { Component, OnInit, ViewChild, ElementRef, AfterViewInit } from '@angular/core';
import { Router } from '@angular/router';
import Corbado from "@corbado/web-js";
 
@Component({
    selector: 'app-login',
    templateUrl: './login.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./login.component.css']
})
export class LoginComponent implements OnInit, AfterViewInit {
    @ViewChild('authElement', { static: false }) authElement!: ElementRef;  // Access the element
 
    constructor(private router: Router) {
    }
 
    ngOnInit() {
        if (Corbado.user) {
            this.router.navigate(['/profile']);
        }
    }
 
    ngAfterViewInit() {
        // Mount the Corbado auth UI after the view initializes
        Corbado.mountAuthUI(this.authElement.nativeElement, {
            onLoggedIn: () => this.router.navigate(['/profile']), // Use Angular's router instead of window.location
        });
    }
}

To establish the reference to our auth UI div we'll put the following into the login.component.html:

<div #authElement></div>

5.3 Set up the profile page

After successful authentication, the Corbado UI component redirects the user to the provided Redirect URL (https://localhost:4200/profile). This page renders basic user information (user ID and email) and provides a button to logout. If the user isn't logged in, it will provide him with the option to go back to the home page.

Because we only render components once Corbado has loaded, the setup of our profile.components.ts file is very straight forward. We can just set the user state to the Corbado.user value to be able to use it in our template. If the user is not logged in, this value will be undefined.

We'll also define a handleLogout callback to allow the user to log out in the template.

This is how our profile.component.ts file should look like.

import { Component } from '@angular/core';
import { Router } from "@angular/router";
import Corbado from "@corbado/web-js";
 
@Component({
    selector: 'app-profile',
    templateUrl: './profile.component.html',
    styleUrls: ['./profile.component.css']
})
export class ProfileComponent {
    user = Corbado.user
 
    constructor(private router: Router) {
    }
 
    async handleLogout() {
        await Corbado.logout()
        await this.router.navigate(['/']);
    }
}

In the profile.component.html we'll use the user state to determine if he's logged in and conditionally render our content:

<div>
    <ng-container *ngIf="user; else notLoggedIn">
        <div>
            <h1>Profile Page</h1>
            <div>
                <p>
                    User-ID: {{user.sub}}
                    <br />
                    Email: {{user.email}}
                </p>
            </div>
            <button (click)="handleLogout()">Logout</button>
        </div>
    </ng-container>
 
    <ng-template #notLoggedIn>
        <div>
            <p>You're not logged in.</p>
            <p>Please go back to <a routerLink="/">home</a> to log in.</p>
        </div>
    </ng-template>
</div>

5.5 Run the application

If everything is set up and installed, run the application with

ng serve

You should see the following screen:

After successful sign up / login, you see the profile page:

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6. Conclusion

This tutorial showed how easy it is to add passwordless authentication with passkeys to an Angular app using Corbado. Besides the passkey-first authentication, Corbado provides simple session management, that we used for a retrieval of basic user data. If you want to read more about how Corbado's session management please check the docs here. If you want to add Corbado to your existing app with existing users, please see our documentation here.