---
id: credentials
title: Credentials
---

### How to

The Credentials provider allows you to handle signing in with arbitrary credentials, such as a username and password, two-factor authentication or hardware device (e.g. YubiKey U2F / FIDO).

It is intended to support use cases where you have an existing system you need to authenticate users against.

```js title="pages/api/auth/[...nextauth].js"
import CredentialsProvider from "next-auth/providers/credentials"
...
providers: [
  CredentialsProvider({
    // The name to display on the sign in form (e.g. 'Sign in with...')
    name: 'Credentials',
    // The credentials is used to generate a suitable form on the sign in page.
    // You can specify whatever fields you are expecting to be submitted.
    // e.g. domain, username, password, 2FA token, etc.
    // You can pass any HTML attribute to the <input> tag through the object.
    credentials: {
      username: { label: "Username", type: "text", placeholder: "jsmith" },
      password: { label: "Password", type: "password" }
    },
    async authorize(credentials, req) {
      // You need to provide your own logic here that takes the credentials
      // submitted and returns either a object representing a user or value
      // that is false/null if the credentials are invalid.
      // e.g. return { id: 1, name: 'J Smith', email: 'jsmith@example.com' }
      // You can also use the `req` object to obtain additional parameters
      // (i.e., the request IP address)
      const res = await fetch("/your/endpoint", {
        method: 'POST',
        body: JSON.stringify(credentials),
        headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" }
      })
      const user = await res.json()

      // If no error and we have user data, return it
      if (res.ok && user) {
        return user
      }
      // Return null if user data could not be retrieved
      return null
    }
  })
]
...
```

See the [Credentials provider documentation](/providers/credentials) for more information.

:::note
The Credentials provider can only be used if JSON Web Tokens are enabled for sessions. Users authenticated with the Credentials provider are not persisted in the database.
:::

### Options

|    Name     |                    Description                    |                 Type                  | Required |
| :---------: | :-----------------------------------------------: | :-----------------------------------: | :------: |
|     id      |            Unique ID for the provider             |               `string`                |   Yes    |
|    name     |         Descriptive name for the provider         |               `string`                |   Yes    |
|    type     |   Type of provider, in this case `credentials`    |            `"credentials"`            |   Yes    |
| credentials |          The credentials to sign-in with          |               `Object`                |   Yes    |
|  authorize  | Callback to execute once user is to be authorized | `(credentials, req) => Promise<User>` |   Yes    |
