Building a Nuxt.js Passkey Login

1. Introduction

2. Prerequisites

3. Repository structure

4. Set up the Nuxt.js project

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. Start using passkeys

6. Conclusion

1. Introduction

In this blog post, well be walking through the process of building a sample application with passkey authentication using Nuxt.js. Well cover the setup of the Corbado UI component as well as the implementation of passkey login functionality for a seamless user experience.

If you want to see the finished code, please have a look at our sample application repository on GitHub.

The result looks as follows:

2. Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes basic familiarity with Nuxt.js, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Lets dive in! Moreover, you need to have Node and NPM installed on your machine.

3. Repository structure

Lets first discuss the structure of our project:

.
├── .env
├── package.json
├── nuxt.config.ts
├── pages
|   ├── index.vue 
|   └── profile.vue
├── layouts 
|   └── default.vue
.

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 Nuxt.js project

In the following, we explain step-by-step what needs to be done to successfully set up the Nuxt.js project.

Lets start out by initializing a new Nuxt.js project:

npx nuxi@latest init passkeys-demo-nuxtjs

Select npm as package manager and press enter. After initialization, execute the following commands to set up your project:

cd passkeys-demo-nuxtjs
npm install

If you now run

npm run dev

the sample skeleton application starts at http://localhost:3000.

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 Nuxt 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:3000.
• Relying Party ID: Provide the domain (no protocol, no port and no path) where passkeys should be bound to, here: localhost

Lastly, retrieve your project ID from the developer panel and store it in your environment file. You can find it here under Corbado API access.

Your environment file should look like this:

VITE_CORBADO_PROJECT_ID=<your-project-id>

You'll need it later to embed the Corbado UI component in your Nuxt app.

5.2. Embed the UI component in the frontend

Install the Corbado web-js library with

npm i @corbado/web-js

Optionally, you can also install the Corbado types to enhance your typescript experience:

npm i -D @corbado/types

First, let's set up our layout under /layouts/default.vue which handles initialization of our Corbado project.

 
<script setup lang="ts">
  import Corbado from "@corbado/web-js"
  import {onMounted} from "vue";
 
  const isInitialized = useState('isInitialized', () => false)
 
  const projectId = import.meta.env.VITE_CORBADO_PROJECT_ID
 
  onMounted(async () => {
    await Corbado.load({
      projectId: projectId,
      darkMode: "off"
    })
    isInitialized.value = true
  })
 
</script>
 
<template>
  <div v-if="isInitialized">
    <slot/>
  </div>
</template>

We'll only render any descendants once our Corbado project has initialized which is ensured by our isInitialized state together with the conditional rendering of the <slot/> component.

Most of your Corbado project is configured in this Corbado.load call. An extensive list of options can be found here.

Let's now set up our login / auth page under pages/index.vue.

We'll create a reference to a div inside our template with the authElement state and then use it in our onMounted to mount the Corbado auth UI. We have to specify an onLoggedIn callback that's executed on either signin or signup and redirects to the profile page in our case.

 
<script setup lang="ts">
  import Corbado from "@corbado/web-js"
  import {onMounted} from "vue";
 
  const authElement = useState<HTMLDivElement | undefined>('authElement', () => undefined)
 
  onMounted(() => {
    if (authElement.value) {
      Corbado.mountAuthUI(authElement.value, {
        onLoggedIn: () => {
          navigateTo("/profile")
        },
      })
    }
  })
</script>
 
<template>
  <div ref="authElement"></div>
</template>

5.3. Set up the profile page

After successful authentication, the Corbado auth UI redirects the user to the provided Redirect URL (/profile). This page renders basic user information (user ID and email) and provides a button to logout. Create the file pages/profile.vue and add the following code:

<script setup lang="ts">
  import Corbado from "@corbado/web-js"
 
  const user = Corbado.user
 
  async function handleLogout() {
    await Corbado.logout()
    await navigateTo("/")
  }
</script>
 
<template>
  <div>
    <div v-if="user">
      <h1>Profile Page</h1>
      <p>
        User-ID: {{ user.sub }}
        <br />
        Email: {{ user.email }}
      </p>
      <button @click="handleLogout">Logout</button>
    </div>
 
    <!-- Show the "not logged in" message if the user is not logged in -->
    <div v-else>
      <p>You're not logged in.</p>
      <p>
        Please go back to <NuxtLink href="/">home</NuxtLink> to log in.
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</template>

This page has content that should only be visible to authenticated users. Therefore, we use Corbado session management in the code above. If the user isn't authenticated, we provide him with a link to the home page.

5.4. Start using passkeys

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

npm run dev

You should see the following screen:

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

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6. Conclusion

This tutorial showed how easy it is to add passwordless authentication with passkeys to a Nuxt.js 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.