Developer-Friendly Passwordless Auth

This content originally appeared on CSS-Tricks and was authored by Chris Coyier

I’d wager to say that most websites that are business-minded have accounts. A way to log into them. Social media sites, eCommerce sites, CMS systems, you name it, having accounts people log into is at the heart of them. So… make it good. That’s what Magic does (great name!).

Have you heard that language used in a sign-in system like “email me a magic link to sign in”? Well, now you know what can power it. But Magic isn’t just that, it’s all types of auth, including social logins and WebAuthn. Magic is a developer SDK that enables passwordless login in all these methods.

Magic is for teams of any size. Upon signing up, you’ll get $85 in credit which covers 10,000 logins, and each login is $0.0085 after that. That kind of pricing makes it extremely affordable for apps of any size. Small apps will have tiny (or no) bill, and by the time you have tens or hundreds of thousands of users, the cost will feel negligible. Especially considering all the time you saved by not rolling auth from scratch.

Why Magic? What does it offer?

Magic appeals to developers because:

1. Superior developer experience. It’s easy to use and it’s fast to implement.
2. Metered pricing — only pay for what you need. Also save money by avoiding the technical debt of your own auth.
3. The ability to adapt to future authentication methods. Auth is always evolving.
4. Don’t have to to deal with passwords — less security concerns.
5. Next-gen security infastructure.

I really like all those, but especially #3. I think of it like image CDNs that offer optimization. The world of images is always evolving as well, and a good image CDN will evolve to support the latest formats and optimization techniques without any work on your end. So too with Magic and Auth.

The “J” and the “a” in Jamstack originally referred to “JavaScript” and “APIs”, which is exactly what Magic offers. Magic fits the Jamstack model very nicely. No server? No problem. Even though Magic absolutely has server-side offerings, and Jamstack could use things like cloud functions, you can get auth done entirely client-side if you’d like. Here’s a great (quick!) tutorial on that.

Here’s the most important thing though: Great UX. Users really like it when the auth of an app feels easy and is never a blocker for them using your app. That’s gonna help your conversion rates.

How do you implement Magic?

First, you need an account. I found it satisfying, of course, that they dog food their own auth signup process, giving you a taste for what you can have right away.

From here, you can scaffold an app out super quickly. The great DX continues here as they offer a way to scaffold out a working app right off the bat:

That’s a web-based starter, for which they have docs, examples, and live demos.

I was able to port a demo over to CodePen Projects super quickly. Check it out!

That’s just a client-side web version. The core of it is really this simple:

import { Magic } from 'magic-sdk'

const m = new Magic(API_KEY)
m.auth.loginWithMagicLink('user@email.address')

They’ve got server-side support for Node, Python, Ruby, PHP and Go. Magic is for apps of any scale, including incredibly security-sensitive apps. For example, you can even use client-side auth but then use AWS services, with their Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and all.

Magic has SDK’s for React Native, iOS, Android, and of course native web. Then in addition to the email magic link style signup, they have social login support for Google, Facebook, Apple, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Linkedin, Twitter, and Discord. Phew! That’s a lot of support for a lot of things. Magic has you covered.

While I was plucking away with this and logging in myself, I could see all the action on my dashboard.

No Passwords

It’s notable that with Magic, there are literally no passwords. Magic email link flow means users need no passwords, and with social logins, users only need to be logged into that other service, not remember/save a password unique to your app. That’s the Magic thesis, which they spell out clearly in Passwords Suck:

Using passwords is a nightmare. No one wants to memorize yet another passphrase when our heads are already filled with them. Passwords are a huge vector for security breaches precisely because they place the burden of choosing unique and secure secrets on the user, who just can’t be bothered. We end up having one password for all the important stuff like banking, work, and school, one for the social-medias, and one for all the miscellaneous one-off services we don’t care too much about. The result is that a whopping 59% of people reuse their passwords across services, which means a leak anywhere quickly becomes a liability for the whole web.

Going password-less is good for users and good for the web.

Get Started

I’d encourage you to check it out. You can sign up for free, no credit card required, and if you do that today you’ll get 10,000 free logins on your account to try out. If you love it, and you have fellow industry folks you refer to Magic, you get 3,000 bonus logins — up to 90,000 in total.

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This content originally appeared on CSS-Tricks and was authored by Chris Coyier