It's been 4 months since we've started building Hanko open source and today we're happy to announce the initial beta release of the project.

The timing couldn't be better, as Apple's passkey implementations will soon be available for everyone to test in the public beta versions of iOS 16 and macOS 13. It's a fascinating experience to see the first true evolutionary step in user authentication in action. Of course, Hanko's passwordless authentication already works perfectly on all current live platforms (iOS, macOS, Android, Windows), just without the full passkey synchronization support that will be available on our devices later this year.

What's new

Hanko's code has been available on GitHub since day 1 of development. We've been adding new features almost daily, and today we reached our biggest milestone yet: the first beta release. Here's what we've added recently and what completes the project:

• UI customization: The last missing piece for the first version of Hanko was UI customization. While we made sure the Hanko login box looked good without any additional styling, our goal was for Hanko to fit seamlessly into any website and brand. Customers want their login to feel native, it should blend well with the rest of the site. This is now possible thanks to the extensive customization options we've added to the Hanko web component, which is delivered as part of our frontend library.
• Hanko-elements published on npm: Besides the minimalistic passkey authentication API, a key feature of Hanko is the <hanko-auth> element, which brings a full user interface, gives your users a modern login and registration experience, and can be integrated into any website with just two lines of code. We have now released the first version of hanko-elements on npm to make building with Hanko as easy as possible.
• E2E testing: Delivering stable code is a priority for us, so we put a lot of effort into setting up end-to-end testing. We use Playwright for this and are very happy with the results. The tests are already integrated into our build pipeline, and we have put together a short guide on how to run the tests locally.‍

How to get started

Just follow the Getting Started guide in the project's readme to get your passkey-enabled login example app up and running with Docker Compose in just a few minutes.‍

Get involved

We'd love to get to know you and hear your feedback, so we invite you to join our growing Hanko Community on Slack and be a part of the passkey revolution.