Set Up Your Vonage Credentials
To complete this tutorial, you’ll need a Vonage account and a Vonage Application. If you don’t have a Vonage account yet, you can sign up and start with free credit.
Create a Vonage Application
A Vonage Application represents your backend service and contains the credentials required to call the Verify API.
Follow these steps in the Vonage Dashboard:
- Open the Vonage Dashboard and select Applications from the left-hand menu.
- Click Create a new application.
- Enter a name for your application (for example:
verify-tutorial). - Click Generate public and private key.
- A private key file will be downloaded automatically.
- Save this file securely. It is required to generate JWTs and must stay on the backend.
- Scroll to the Capabilities section and enable Network Registry.
- Select the Playground environment.
- Leave the rest of the Network Registry configuration empty for now. We’ll return to it later in the tutorial.
- Click Generate new application to finish.
- After creation, copy the Application ID shown in the dashboard.
Important security rule
- The private key must never be included in a mobile app.
- Only the backend will use it to authenticate with Vonage.
Configure Environment Variables
Now we’ll store the Vonage credentials in the .env file used by the backend.
Open the .env file you created earlier and add:
Note: Using a relative path (./private.key) keeps the project portable and avoids machine-specific paths.
Explanation:
VONAGE_APPLICATION_ID: the Application ID from the Vonage Dashboard.VONAGE_PRIVATE_KEY_PATH: path to the private key file used to sign JWTs.
Place the downloaded private key file in your backend folder and name it private.key. Then, add it to the .gitignore file:
Updated Folder Structure
After this step, your backend folder will look like:
Getting Started with Silent Authentication
Silent Authentication takes quite a bit to understand. This tutorial shows you how to build an integration from scratch with Nodejs and Kotlin