Login at a new computer/browser

1

First of all, please forgive me if I’m asking the obvious, or if this was answered before or is in the documentation, I’ve been scouring the web for the past three weeks and I can’t find a clear answer to my question.
I’ve installed passbolt community (several times, in a container and in VMs) I got no errors and everything works just fine in the browser I use for the initial setup, but as soon as I try to login in another browser/computer, I install the plugin but I only get the:
“The plugin is installed but not configured. Please contact your domain administrator to request an invitation, or recover your account if you already have one!”
“You need an account to login”
Which leads me to believe I have something wrong on the server side, because I keep seeing in tutorials all over the web where I should be getting a similar page but with:
“Nice one! The plugin is installed and configured. You are good to go”
“Username *”
“Passphrase *”
And it seems my only option is to try and recover the account, which is not lost, so doesn’t seem right.
All official installation manuals and every tutorial I’ve encountered ends at " That’s it!" right before this step, so it seems like there’s a bit of lacking information regarding this step, I assume is because it just works intuitively 99,999% of the time, but since it doesn’t for me, I see no other course of action than to ask you all.

If this is the normal behavior and recover the account is the right thing to do every time, I humbly suggest this bit is added to the official installation manuals.

Thank you for your time.

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Hi @Scar_UY,

This behaviour is totally normal, your Passbolt’s server store public key of each user. But the private key is always on your device, inside the browser extension, so every time that you are using a new device and more precisely a new browser’s profile, you need to perform a recover to set it up.
Since the browser extension v3.0.0 we simplify the process of recover. So you only need to enter your email, go through the recover link, upload your private key enter your passphrase and the extension is configured.
If you are curious and you want to understand how the security work, you have a look at our security white paper: https://help.passbolt.com/assets/files/Security%20White%20Paper%20-%20Passbolt%20Pro%20Edition.pdf
I hope that it is more clear now.

Cheers,
Max

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3

Thank you very much for the lighting fast answer! I totally get why this is a good idea, so I emphasize my suggestion to add at least a mention that this is the default and expected behavior somewhere on the installation manuals or the documentation (maybe it’s there, but I couldn’t find it).

That could have saved me weeks of delays, internet searches and personal time! I don’t like to resort to ask in forums until I’ve exhausted all other resources, I think the time people are giving for free so others like me can use their software is better employed working in said software or with their families rather than answering my silly questions…

Have a nice day and thank you very much again!

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