GitHub Authenticator Plug-in

This project provides an opens source GitHub Authenticator plug-in for the Curity Identity Server. This allows an administrator to add functionality to the Curity Identity Server which will then enable end users to login using their GitHub credentials. The app that integrates with the Curity Identity Server may also be configured to receive the GitHub access token, allowing it to manage resources in a GitHub.

System Requirements

• Curity Identity Server 7.1.0 and its system requirements

Requirements for Building from Source

• Maven 3
• Java SDK 17 or later

Compiling the Plug-in from Source

The source is very easy to compile. To do so from a shell, issue this command: mvn package.

Installation

To install this plug-in, either download a binary version available from the releases section of this project's GitHub repository or compile it from source (as described above). If you compiled the plug-in from source, the package will be placed in the target subdirectory. The resulting JAR file or the one downloaded from GitHub needs to placed in the directory ${IDSVR_HOME}/usr/share/plugins/github. (The name of the last directory, github, which is the plug-in group, is arbitrary and can be anything.) After doing so, the plug-in will become available as soon as the node is restarted.

Note

The JAR file needs to be deployed to each run-time node and the admin node. For simple test deployments where the admin node is a run-time node, the JAR file only needs to be copied to one location.

For a more detailed explanation of installing plug-ins, refer to the Curity developer guide.

Creating an App in GitHub

As described in the GitHub documentation, You can create and register an OAuth App under your personal account or under any organization you have administrative access to.

Creating a new GitHub application

Then, give the app a name, e.g., Curity-Enterprise-Integration-App.

When you view the app's configuration after creating it, you'll find the Client ID and Client Secret. These will be needed later when configuring the plug-in in Curity.

GitHub will also display the Authorization callback URL in the new app's configuration. This needs to match the yet-to-be-created GitHub authenticator instance in Curity. The default will not work, and, if used, will result in an error. This should be updated to some URL that follows the pattern $baseUrl/$authenticationEndpointPath/$githubAuthnticatorId/callback, where each of these URI components has the following meaning:

URI Component	Meaning
baseUrl	The base URL of the server (defined on the System --> General page of the admin GUI). If this value is not set, then the server scheme, name, and port should be used (e.g., https://localhost:8443).
authenticationEndpointPath	The path of the authentication endpoint. In the admin GUI, this is located in the authentication profile's Endpoints tab for the endpoint that has the type auth-authentication.
githubAuthenticatorId	This is the name given to the GitHub authenticator when defining it (e.g., github1).

Once the redirect URI is updated, the app is ready to be used from Curity.

Creating a GitHub Authenticator in Curity

The easiest way to configure a new GitHub authenticator is using the Curity admin UI. The configuration for this can be downloaded as XML or CLI commands later, so only the steps to do this in the GUI will be described.

1. Go to the Authenticators page of the authentication profile wherein the authenticator instance should be created.
2. Click the New Authenticator button.
3. Enter a name (e.g., github1). This name needs to match the URI component in the callback URI set in the GitHub app.
4. For the type, pick the GitHub option:

5. On the next page, you can define all of the standard authenticator configuration options like any previous authenticator that should run, the resulting ACR, transformers that should executed, etc. At the bottom of the configuration page, the GitHub-specific options can be found.

The GitHub-specific configuration is generated dynamically based on the configuration model defined in the Java interface.

6. Certain required and optional configuration settings may be provided. One of these is the HTTP Client setting. This is the HTTP client that will be used to communicate with the GitHub OAuth server's token and user info endpoints. To define this, do the following:

   1. click the Facilities button at the top-right of the screen.

   2. Next to HTTP, click New.

   3. Enter some name (e.g., githubClient).

   4. Click Apply.

      

7. Back in the GitHub authenticator instance that you started to define, select the new HTTP client from the dropdown.

   

8. In the Client ID textfield, enter the client ID from the GitHub app configuration.

9. Also enter the matching Client Secret.

10. If you have enabled any scopes or wish to limit the scopes that Curity will request of GitHub, toggle on the desired scopes (e.g., Manage Organization or Gists).

Once all of these changes are made, they will be staged, but not committed (i.e., not running). To make them active, click the Commit menu option in the Changes menu. Optionally enter a comment in the Deploy Changes dialogue and click OK.

Once the configuration is committed and running, the authenticator can be used like any other.

Tests

The plugin is tested using end to end tests that run on a GitHub Actions workflow. The test starts up an instance of the Curity Identity Server, a simple SPA and uses Cypress to perform a login flow.

Running tests Locally with Cypress

To run the test suite locally, first ensure that you have an instance of the Curity Identity Server running with the plugin installed and using the configuration found in tests/idsvr/config.xml. Next install Cypress using the following commands.

cd tests
npm i

You can then open the Cypress app to run tests with npm run cypress.open or run the headless version of the tests with npm run cypress.run.

Running the GitHub Actions Workflow Locally

To run the GitHub Actions workflow locally refer to this README <https://github.com/curityio/github-action-utilities>.

License

This plugin and its associated documentation is listed under the Apache 2 license.

More Information

Please visit curity.io for more information about the Curity Identity Server.

Copyright (C) 2017 Curity AB.