Passwordless authentication with Terraform

Smoke cleared from the deployment logs. The build was clean, infrastructure was live, but the authentication stack felt heavy. Password fatigue was everywhere. The answer wasn’t another password policy. It was no passwords at all.

Passwordless authentication with Terraform changes how you deliver secure access. No secrets stored. No password leaks. Identity becomes a service, wired directly into your infrastructure code.

Terraform lets you define and deploy resources declaratively. By integrating passwordless authentication providers—like WebAuthn, magic links, or one-time codes—you write security right into your .tf files. Users log in with strong, phishing-resistant factors. You remove credential storage from your attack surface.

The core steps to manage passwordless authentication via Terraform are:

1. Choose a provider with Terraform support. Look for APIs that expose key authentication flows without passwords.
2. Add the provider block with your credentials or API tokens into provider.tf.
3. Declare authentication resources such as identity endpoints, policy rules, and allowed authentication methods.
4. Bind authentication to application services so login flows point to the passwordless endpoints.
5. Apply and version control your infrastructure changes to track every update.

Passwordless authentication in Terraform delivers three main advantages:

• Infrastructure as Code security – Access rules live alongside your network configs.
• Reduced breach risk – No passwords means nothing to steal in a dump.
• Scalability – New projects inherit secure access patterns immediately.

To go deeper, use modules for authentication. This keeps configurations reusable across environments. Combine these modules with Terraform workspaces to maintain separate states for staging, dev, and production. Secure variables through your Terraform Cloud workspace or a secrets manager, never in plain .tf files.

Audit by running terraform plan before every deploy. This shows exactly what will change in your authentication stack. Integrate pipeline checks so passwordless modules meet compliance before merging.

Passwordless authentication isn’t a trend—it’s a security upgrade you own and automate. Terraform makes it part of the deployment process every time, without manual setup or drift.

Ready to see passwordless authentication with Terraform in action? Build and ship a live demo at hoop.dev in minutes.