Set up your application

The first thing you need to do is head over to the Clerk Dashboard and click on the Add Application button. You'll then be presented with a subset of the available authentication settings (no worries, you can always change them later):

An application is comprised of different instances. In particular, once the application is created, you should be able to see the following instances:

Now that we have an application, let's continue by configuring our development instance. In the rest of this guide we'll talk about:

These configuration settings affect how the users of your application can sign in and sign up as well as which attributes are editable via their user profile. You can find these settings under the User & Authentication section.

All of the options in this page will affect what fields will be required during sign up.

Under the Contact information section, you can configure whether you want to support email addresses or phone numbers (or both) to contact your users. Each identifier follows a toggle on/off logic, which enables the attribute on the user profile.

At the moment we support the following configuration for each identifier:

You can choose to leave both Email address and Phone number off. The two fields won't be present during sign up, so you need to either enable Usernames or at least one social provider.

You'll notice a small cog icon for each option, which allows you to further configure the identifier's behavior. Available configuration options are:

Here's an example of what the additional configuration options modal looks like for email addresses.

The options for Username are a bit different. You can specify whether a username is required for every new user that signs up, or if users can simply set usernames in their profile.

A username should be from 4 to 64 characters long and can contain alphanumeric characters, underscores (_) or dashes (-).

Usernames can be used for identification as well, allowing your application to support authenticating with a username during sign up and sign in flows.

Under the Authentication factors section, you can select which methods are available for completing a user's authentication process. At the moment, there are four available options:

Finally, you have the option to define what personal information must be collected from a user.

Whatever you select here will affect the resulted sign-up flow since the user will need to supply this additional information. Every field you select here will be editable through the user's profile.

For each of the selected personal information you can choose whether it's required or optional. If something is required, then the user must supply it during the sign-up flow, and cannot be emptied afterwards.

At the moment, we support the following personal information:

Clerk offers a list of Social Login providers that can be used during sign up and sign in. For each of the selected providers, there will be a button on sign in and sign up pages with the provider's logo and the appropriate text.

The Social Login process is smart enough to automatically convert a sign up flow of an already registered user into a sign in flow and vice versa. For more information on how to set up sign up and sign in flows using social providers, check our detailed guide.

For each provider, Clerk is offering a shared profile that can be used for development. However, for security reasons, production instances must use a custom profile with its own credentials.

At the moment, we support the following social providers:

For additional security, you can give the option to your application users to enable multi-factor authentication. In this section you can select which multi-factor methods can be used.

At the moment we support the following:

For more information on multi-factor authentication, check our detailed guide.

This setting affects how many accounts users can have in a single browser tab.

Clerk offers multi-sessions out of the box, just by selecting the respective option in this section. If Multi-session handling is selected, then users can sign into multiple accounts and easily switch between them.

For more information on how to work with multi-session applications, check our detailed guide.

Clerk also offers the ability to control your application's security by tweaking your session duration. For more information check our Session Lifetime guide.

The settings on this section control the look and feel of your application. From here you can control the colors, fonts, spacing and other properties of your application.

These settings affect all Clerk Components of your application.

The theme settings we provide are:

For more control and flexibility over the theming of your Clerk Components, you can specify theming options at the code level following our customization guide using the theme prop and Clerk CSS variables.