Account Management

Account Creation

Atmospheric apps should generally implement an account creation flow of their own — e.g., "Log in or sign up." They may or may not run their own PDS as a default home for new accounts. Once a user has created an account on any PDS, including a Bluesky PDS, they can log in to any atproto app using that account. This works via DID resolution, which allows apps to find the PDS that's hosting a given account and trigger the auth flow on that PDS.

Account Management

Once you have an account, you can manage it via the host PDS. Our reference PDS includes a basic account management interface that is accessible at https://pds.example.com/account. From this interface, you can:

• See a list of devices that are currently logged in to your account, and log out of any of them:

• See a list of apps that have permission to access your account, and revoke any of those permissions:

• Change your password:

• Change the email address associated with your account:

You can also perform some account actions — including on PDSes that do not implement this interface — using goat, our CLI tool.

$ goat account
NAME:
   goat account - commands for auth session and account management

USAGE:
   goat account [command [command options]]

COMMANDS:
   login                 create session with PDS instance
   logout                delete any current session
   activate              (re)activate current account
   deactivate            deactivate current account
   status                show basic account hosting status for any account
   update-handle         change handle for current account
   check-auth            check session auth and current account status
   missing-blobs         list any missing blobs for current account
   service-auth          ask the PDS to create a service auth token
   service-auth-offline  create service auth token via locally-held signing key
   create                create a new account on the indicated PDS host
   migrate               move account to a new PDS. requires full auth (not app password)
   plc                   commands for managing PLC identity (DID) via PDS host

You can install goat via homebrew:

brew install goat

Refer to the goat repository for more details.

Account Migration

To migrate your account to another PDS, see Account Migration.

If your host PDS becomes unavailable, see Account Recovery.