Invite users

If your application must be accessible only to a hand-picked group of specific individuals, and you don't want to make registration publicly available, you can send invitations to selected users.

The process of inviting users to an Ory-powered application follows these steps:

1. You create a basic user account for the user you want to invite. You use their email address as the account identifier.
2. You trigger account recovery for the user account you created.
3. You get the recovery link from the API response and send it to the user's email address.
4. The user performs account recovery which forces them to define new credentials.
5. The user gets a fully functional account with the credentials they defined.

info

Automating this process requires writing custom code that relies on the specifics of your implementation.

Procedure

Send these API calls to the Admin API to create a new user account and create a recovery link. Admin API calls don't trigger Ory Actions.

tip

You need an API Key to call these endpoints. Read Authorization with API Keys to learn more.

1. Create a new user account:

   curl --request POST -sL \
     --header "Authorization: Bearer {ORY_API_KEY}" \
     --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
     --data '{
     "schema_id": "preset://email",
     "traits": {
        "email": "{USER_EMAIL_ADDRESS}"
       }
     }' https://{project-slug}.projects.oryapis.com/admin/identities
   info

   The schema_id property must point to the schema set in your project. To get the schema name, look for default_schema_id in your Ory Identities configuration. Read the Ory CLI documentation to learn how to get your Ory Identities configuration and save it to a file.

2. Get the ID of the created account from the API response:

   {
      "id":"{ACCOUNT_ID}",
      "credentials":{
         "password":{
            "type":"password",
            "identifiers":[
               "{USER_EMAIL_ADDRESS}"
            ],
            "version":0,
            "created_at":"2023-02-17T14:16:06.8591Z",
            "updated_at":"2023-02-17T14:16:06.8591Z"
         },
         // ...

3. Use the account ID to get the recovery link for that account.

   note

   Use the expires_in property to set the appropriate expiry time for the recovery link. If the user you want to invite doesn't access the link before it expires, you must generate a new recovery link.

   curl --request POST -sL \
      --header "Authorization: Bearer {ORY_API_KEY}" \
      --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
      --data '{
      "expires_in": "12h",
      "identity_id": "{ACCOUNT_ID}"
      }' https://{project-slug}.projects.oryapis.com/admin/recovery/link

4. Copy the recovery link from the API response and send it to the user:

   {
     "recovery_link": "https://{project-slug}.projects.oryapis.com/self-service/recovery?flow=b6c81504-dc8e-4786-b849-ac292bc9f317&token=VjKUKGU7J4YAonC5b5q1hDySJjWGh3qf",
     "expires_at": "2023-02-18T02:16:47.286385565Z"
   }