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Overview

The DataHub React application supports OIDC authentication built on top of the Pac4j Play library. This enables operators of DataHub to integrate with 3rd party identity providers like Okta, Google, Keycloak, & more to authenticate their users.

When configured, OIDC auth will be enabled between clients of the DataHub UI & datahub-frontend server. Beyond this point is considered to be a secure environment and as such authentication is validated & enforced only at the "front door" inside datahub-frontend.

caution

Even if OIDC is configured the root user can still login without OIDC by going to /login URL endpoint. It is recommended that you don't use the default credentials by mounting a different file in the front end container. To do this please see this guide to mount a custom user.props file for a JAAS authenticated deployment.

Provider-Specific Guides​

  1. Configuring OIDC using Google
  2. Configuring OIDC using Okta
  3. Configuring OIDC using Azure

Configuring OIDC in React​

1. Register an app with your Identity Provider​

To configure OIDC in React, you will most often need to register yourself as a client with your identity provider (Google, Okta, etc). Each provider may have their own instructions. Provided below are links to examples for Okta, Google, Azure AD, & Keycloak.

During the registration process, you'll need to provide a login redirect URI to the identity provider. This tells the identity provider where to redirect to once they've authenticated the end user.

By default, the URL will be constructed as follows:

"http://your-datahub-domain.com/callback/oidc"

For example, if you're hosted DataHub at datahub.myorg.com, this value would be http://datahub.myorg.com/callback/oidc. For testing purposes you can also specify localhost as the domain name directly: http://localhost:9002/callback/oidc

The goal of this step should be to obtain the following values, which will need to be configured before deploying DataHub:

  1. Client ID - A unique identifier for your application with the identity provider
  2. Client Secret - A shared secret to use for exchange between you and your identity provider
  3. Discovery URL - A URL where the OIDC API of your identity provider can be discovered. This should suffixed by .well-known/openid-configuration. Sometimes, identity providers will not explicitly include this URL in their setup guides, though this endpoint will exist as per the OIDC specification. For more info see http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html.

2. Configure DataHub Frontend Server​

The second step to enabling OIDC involves configuring datahub-frontend to enable OIDC authentication with your Identity Provider.

To do so, you must update the datahub-frontend docker.env file with the values received from your identity provider:

# Required Configuration Values:
AUTH_OIDC_ENABLED=true
AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_ID=your-client-id
AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET=your-client-secret
AUTH_OIDC_DISCOVERY_URI=your-provider-discovery-url
AUTH_OIDC_BASE_URL=your-datahub-url
  • AUTH_OIDC_ENABLED: Enable delegating authentication to OIDC identity provider
  • AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_ID: Unique client id received from identity provider
  • AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET: Unique client secret received from identity provider
  • AUTH_OIDC_DISCOVERY_URI: Location of the identity provider OIDC discovery API. Suffixed with .well-known/openid-configuration
  • AUTH_OIDC_BASE_URL: The base URL of your DataHub deployment, e.g. https://yourorgdatahub.com (prod) or http://localhost:9002 (testing)

Providing these configs will cause DataHub to delegate authentication to your identity provider, requesting the "oidc email profile" scopes and parsing the "preferred_username" claim from the authenticated profile as the DataHub CorpUser identity.

By default, the login callback endpoint exposed by DataHub will be located at ${AUTH_OIDC_BASE_URL}/callback/oidc. This must exactly match the login redirect URL you've registered with your identity provider in step 1.

In kubernetes, you can add the above env variables in the values.yaml as follows.

datahub-frontend:
  ...
  extraEnvs:
    - name: AUTH_OIDC_ENABLED
      value: "true"
    - name: AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_ID
      value: your-client-id
    - name: AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET
      value: your-client-secret
    - name: AUTH_OIDC_DISCOVERY_URI
      value: your-provider-discovery-url
    - name: AUTH_OIDC_BASE_URL
      value: your-datahub-url

You can also package OIDC client secrets into a k8s secret by running

kubectl create secret generic datahub-oidc-secret --from-literal=secret=<<OIDC SECRET>>

Then set the secret env as follows.

    - name: AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_SECRET
      valueFrom:
        secretKeyRef:
          name: datahub-oidc-secret
          key: secret

Advanced​

You can optionally customize the flow further using advanced configurations. These allow you to specify the OIDC scopes requested, how the DataHub username is parsed from the claims returned by the identity provider, and how users and groups are extracted and provisioned from the OIDC claim set.

# Optional Configuration Values:
AUTH_OIDC_USER_NAME_CLAIM=your-custom-claim
AUTH_OIDC_USER_NAME_CLAIM_REGEX=your-custom-regex
AUTH_OIDC_SCOPE=your-custom-scope
AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD=authentication-method
  • AUTH_OIDC_USER_NAME_CLAIM: The attribute that will contain the username used on the DataHub platform. By default, this is "email" provided as part of the standard email scope.
  • AUTH_OIDC_USER_NAME_CLAIM_REGEX: A regex string used for extracting the username from the userNameClaim attribute. For example, if the userNameClaim field will contain an email address, and we want to omit the domain name suffix of the email, we can specify a custom regex to do so. (e.g. ([^@]+))
  • AUTH_OIDC_SCOPE: a string representing the scopes to be requested from the identity provider, granted by the end user. For more info, see OpenID Connect Scopes.
  • AUTH_OIDC_CLIENT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD: a string representing the token authentication method to use with the identity provider. Default value is client_secret_basic, which uses HTTP Basic authentication. Another option is client_secret_post, which includes the client_id and secret_id as form parameters in the HTTP POST request. For more info, see OAuth 2.0 Client Authentication

Additional OIDC Options:

  • AUTH_OIDC_PREFERRED_JWS_ALGORITHM - Can be used to select a preferred signing algorithm for id tokens. Examples include: RS256 or HS256. If your IdP includes none before RS256/HS256 in the list of signing algorithms, then this value MUST be set.
User & Group Provisioning (JIT Provisioning)​

By default, DataHub will optimistically attempt to provision users and groups that do not already exist at the time of login. For users, we extract information like first name, last name, display name, & email to construct a basic user profile. If a groups claim is present, we simply extract their names.

The default provisioning behavior can be customized using the following configs.

# User and groups provisioning
AUTH_OIDC_JIT_PROVISIONING_ENABLED=true
AUTH_OIDC_PRE_PROVISIONING_REQUIRED=false
AUTH_OIDC_EXTRACT_GROUPS_ENABLED=false
AUTH_OIDC_GROUPS_CLAIM=<your-groups-claim-name>
  • AUTH_OIDC_JIT_PROVISIONING_ENABLED: Whether DataHub users & groups should be provisioned on login if they do not exist. Defaults to true.
  • AUTH_OIDC_PRE_PROVISIONING_REQUIRED: Whether the user should already exist in DataHub when they login, failing login if they are not. This is appropriate for situations in which users and groups are batch ingested and tightly controlled inside your environment. Defaults to false.
  • AUTH_OIDC_EXTRACT_GROUPS_ENABLED: Only applies if AUTH_OIDC_JIT_PROVISIONING_ENABLED is set to true. This determines whether we should attempt to extract a list of group names from a particular claim in the OIDC attributes. Note that if this is enabled, each login will re-sync group membership with the groups in your Identity Provider, clearing the group membership that has been assigned through the DataHub UI. Enable with care! Defaults to false.
  • AUTH_OIDC_GROUPS_CLAIM: Only applies if AUTH_OIDC_EXTRACT_GROUPS_ENABLED is set to true. This determines which OIDC claims will contain a list of string group names. Accepts multiple claim names with comma-separated values. I.e: groups, teams, departments. Defaults to 'groups'.

Once configuration has been updated, datahub-frontend-react will need to be restarted to pick up the new environment variables:

docker-compose -p datahub -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.override.yml  up datahub-frontend-react

Note that by default, enabling OIDC will not disable the dummy JAAS authentication path, which can be reached at the /login route of the React app. To disable this authentication path, additionally specify the following config: AUTH_JAAS_ENABLED=false

Summary​

Once configured, deploying the datahub-frontend-react container will enable an indirect authentication flow in which DataHub delegates authentication to the specified identity provider.

Once a user is authenticated by the identity provider, DataHub will extract a username from the provided claims and grant DataHub access to the user by setting a pair of session cookies.

A brief summary of the steps that occur when the user navigates to the React app are as follows:

  1. A GET to the /authenticate endpoint in datahub-frontend server is initiated
  2. The /authenticate attempts to authenticate the request via session cookies
  3. If auth fails, the server issues a redirect to the Identity Provider's login experience
  4. The user logs in with the Identity Provider
  5. The Identity Provider authenticates the user and redirects back to DataHub's registered login redirect URL, providing an authorization code which can be used to retrieve information on behalf of the authenticated user
  6. DataHub fetches the authenticated user's profile and extracts a username to identify the user on DataHub (eg. urn:li:corpuser:username)
  7. DataHub sets session cookies for the newly authenticated user
  8. DataHub redirects the user to the homepage ("/")

FAQ​

No users can log in. Instead, I get redirected to the login page with an error. What do I do?

This can occur for a variety of reasons, but most often it is due to misconfiguration of Single-Sign On, either on the DataHub side or on the Identity Provider side.

First, verify that all values are consistent across them (e.g. the host URL where DataHub is deployed), and that no values are misspelled (client id, client secret).

Next, verify that the scopes requested are supported by your Identity Provider and that the claim (i.e. attribute) DataHub uses for uniquely identifying the user is supported by your Identity Provider (refer to Identity Provider OpenID Connect documentation). By default, this claim is email.

Then, make sure the Discovery URI you've configured (AUTH_OIDC_DISCOVERY_URI) is accessible where the datahub-frontend container is running. You can do this by issuing a basic CURL to the address (Pro-Tip: you may also visit the address in your browser to check more specific details about your Identity Provider).

Finally, check the container logs for the datahub-frontend container. This should hopefully provide some additional context around why exactly the login handoff is not working.

If all else fails, feel free to reach out to the DataHub Community on Slack for real-time support

I'm seeing an error in the datahub-frontend logs when a user tries to login

Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to resolve user name claim from profile provided by Identity Provider. Missing attribute. Attribute: 'email', Regex: '(.*)', Profile: { ...

what do I do?

This indicates that your Identity Provider does not provide the claim with name 'email', which DataHub uses by default to uniquely identify users within your organization.

To fix this, you may need to

  1. Change the claim that is used as the unique user identifier to something else by changing the AUTH_OIDC_USER_NAME_CLAIM (e.g. to "name" or "preferredusername") _OR
  2. Change the environment variable AUTH_OIDC_SCOPE to include the scope required to retrieve the claim with name "email"

For the datahub-frontend container / pod.

Pro-Tip: Check the documentation for your Identity Provider to learn more about the scope claims supported.