Magic Link

Introduction

Managing password authentication entails significant overhead for engineering teams and opens up many risks for breaches. Magic Link from WorkOS gives you the ability to build a secure passwordless authentication flow utilizing email. Send users a one-time-use link and let them sign in with a single click.

Magic Link sets you up to handle Single Sign-On via the WorkOS SSO API. The redirect URI / profile retrieval process is identical between Magic Link and SSO.

Magic Link is not a session management solution - instead it is an authentication solution. You as the developer have the ability to manage user sessions as you see fit. This means you determine how long a session is valid for, as well as how to store and invalidate a session.

What you’ll build

In this guide, we’ll take you from learning about passwordless authentication all the way through to building production-ready passwordless authentication flows with the WorkOS Magic Link API.

Sign in to your Developer Dashboard account to see code examples pre-filled with your API keys and resource IDs.

This guide will show you how to:

Before getting started

To get the most out of this guide, you’ll need:

• A Developer Dashboard account.

API Object Definitions

1. Install the WorkOS SDK of your choice

WorkOS offers native SDKs in several popular programming languages. Choose a language below to see instructions in your application’s language.

Install the SDK using the command below.

npm install @workos-inc/node

2. Set environment variables

As a best practice, your WorkOS API key should be kept secret and set as an environment variable on process start. The Project ID should also be set dynamically based on the release environment.

WORKOS_API_KEY='{secretKey}'
WORKOS_CLIENT_ID='{clientID}'

3. Add a callback endpoint

Let’s first add the redirect endpoint which will handle the callback from WorkOS after a user has authenticated via a magic link. This endpoint should exchange the authorization code (valid for 10 minutes) returned by WorkOS with the authenticated user’s Profile.

The redirect URI must use HTTPS.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
const express = require('express');
const WorkOS = require('@workos-inc/node');

const app = express();

const workos = new WorkOS(process.env.WORKOS_API_KEY);
const clientID = process.env.WORKOS_CLIENT_ID;

app.get('/callback', async (req, res) => {
  const { code } = req.query;

  const { profile } = await workos.sso.getProfileAndToken({
    code,
    clientID,
  });

  // Use the information in `profile` for further business logic.

  res.redirect('/');
});

4. Create a Passwordless Session and email the user

Create a Passwordless Session to generate an authentication link for a user. An authentication link is valid for 5 minutes and can be sent via the WorkOS API or using your own email service.

You can use the optional state parameter to encode arbitrary information to help restore application state between redirects.

You can use the optional redirect_uri parameter to override the default Redirect URI set in the dashboard.

A Magic Link Connection will be automatically created if there isn’t already one for the domain specified when creating a new Passwordless Session.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
const express = require('express');
const WorkOS = require('@workos-inc/node');

const app = express();

const workos = new WorkOS(process.env.WORKOS_API_KEY);

app.post('/passwordless-auth', (req, res) => {
  const email =  // ... Email of the user to authenticate

  const session = await workos.passwordless.createSession({
    email,
    type: 'MagicLink',
  });
  await workos.passwordless.sendSession(session.id);

  // Finally, redirect to a "Check your email" page
});