Login with GitHub
Configuring Flipt to enable login with GitHub via OAuth 2.0
If you’ve read the Login With Google guide, you would have learned that Flipt supports many methods of authentication for users to control who has access to Flipt.
Alongside the support for generic OIDC login, Flipt has launched support for login with GitHub in version v1.26.0, through their OAuth 2.0 flow. This guide will serve as a walk-through on how to set this flow up for users of Flipt in your organization.
Prerequisites
Brief Explanation of OAuth 2.0
OAuth 2.0 is an authentication standard whose goal is to allow 3rd party applications to access authorized resources from a provider. It relies on the user explicitly granting access to the 3rd party application to issue a token on behalf of the OAuth 2.0 provider for authorized use.
Unlike OIDC, OAuth 2.0 does not have a standardized identity layer, which means the process of retrieving identity information varies between providers. Users should consult their OAuth 2.0 provider’s documentation to understand the specific methods for retrieving identity information.
Creating a GitHub OAuth 2.0 Application
-
Navigate to your GitHub account, and click on
Settings
under the menu of your Profile icon -
At the bottom of the menu on the left, click on the menu option titled
Developer Settings
-
This should bring you to a page that has
OAuth Apps
as a menu option on the left, click on that and clickNew OAuth App
to start creating the application -
You should be brought to a page that looks like the image below, and can start filling out the information:
Application Name
: Give your application a meaningful nameHomepage URL
: Usually Flipt will be used internally by organizations, so this value depends on how you plan to expose Flipt. When in doubt you can just use the URL to your organization’s home pageAuthorization callback URL
: For this value, you’ll need your Flipt URL followed by/auth/v1/method/github/callback
. Since we will be running Flipt in a Docker container locally, we will usehttp://localhost:8080/auth/v1/method/github/callback
instead of actual Flipt URL.
We’re using localhost:8080
here for illustration purposes. In a production
setting, you would use whichever accessible domain name you have configured
for your Flipt deployment. These values can always be changed later after the
creation of the application.
- Retrieve the
Client ID
andClient Secret
from the created OAuth 2.0 app
The Client ID should already be provided to you. You will have to generate a client secret. Click on the Generate a new client secret
button (it may ask you to authenticate again with GitHub).
Running Flipt
1. Define a Flipt config.yml
Flipt relies on configuration that the user provides for many bits of functionality. To enable the Login With GitHub feature, you must define a configuration file config.yml
with certain fields and values.
The configuration documentation gives a complete list of all configuration values available for how to configure Flipt.
The Authentication Methods: GitHub section of the configuration documentation describes the values needed to enable the Login with GitHub functionality.
It should look similar to the following:
The client_id
and client_secret
are going to be the values from your GitHub OAuth application. The redirect_address
will be http://localhost:8080
. The scopes
are entirely dependent on what level of access you would like the returned GitHub access token to have. The GitHub documentation describes a list of valid scopes.
The last bit of configuration is the session details. In order for the browser to establish a session to communicate with Flipt in an authenticated way, you must provide access details in an HTTP cookie whose value is a static token created by Flipt. This static token is created during the GitHub OAuth 2.0 flow, and associated with the GitHub metadata retrieved from the GitHub API with the access token. The domain
value will specify which host can receive the cookie.
2. Run Flipt as a Docker container
This will mount the config.yml
as a volume in the container, and Flipt will use that configuration as it’s provided as a command line flag option.
3. Navigate to the Flipt UI
Access the Flipt UI by typing in the http://localhost:8080
URL in the address bar of a browser. You should see the following screen:
Click the button to Login With GitHub, and it should take you to the GitHub domain to complete the authentication flow with the following screen:
Click on the green Authorize {username}
button to allow completion of the OAuth 2.0 flow
Conclusion
After completion of the flow you should be taken to the normal Flipt homepage and start using Flipt normally as before. If you have a profile picture on GitHub, it should show in the top right corner.
This guide shows the basics of getting Flipt running with GitHub OAuth 2.0 authentication in a development environment.
Now that you know the basics, you can tailor the configuration pieces to fit your exact use cases. For instance, you would not use localhost:8080
in a production setting, but rather a custom domain. If you have a custom domain, you can modify the Authorization Callback URL
value on the GitHub OAuth application page, the redirect_address
, and domain
configuration values for the Flipt configuration.
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