If the “Settings” tab of your Scrivito Dashboard doesn’t include the “Visitor Identity Providers” or “Editor Identity Provider” sections, please have them enabled by our Scrivito Support. The “Editor Identity Provider” section contains nothing but a button for opening the JustRelate Console.

An identity provider (IdP) offers user authentication as a service. For service providers, the main benefit of using IdPs is that the identity of users can be asserted without the need to store and manage their accounts and passwords.

Most people come into contact with identity providers when they click on login form buttons such as “Log in with Google”, for example. For users, it is convenient to be able to bypass login forms, and to not have to maintain dedicated credentials for a further service.

Scrivito works with any identity provider supporting OpenID Connect. You can even connect your own Active Directory or LDAP, as long as they’re configured for OpenID Connect.

OpenID Connect is a widely used authentication service supported by several major cloud platform providers such as Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. So any person with an account at any of these providers can be added as a website visitor or editor to a Scrivito CMS.

OpenID Connect is based on the OpenID 2.0 and OAuth 2.0 protocols. OpenID Connect directly incorporates OAuth 2.0 capabilities. These components are open standards, so you can be confident that your visitors and editors are logged in securely.

For your website to support logging in via a visitor identity provider, three steps need to be made:

1. Register your website with the IdP.
2. Register the IdP in your Scrivito Dashboard. You can register up to twenty visitor IdPs.
3. Integrate a log-in form into your website that lets visitors authenticate via the IdP(s).

Afterwards, only logged-in visitors are given access to website content that is flagged as restricted. Below, we will guide you through the first two steps, the registrations. Making your website fit for logging in via the IdP is covered by the corresponding API documentation.

To set up an editor identity provider, only two steps are required:

1. Register your website with the IdP.
2. Register the IdP in your Console.

Using the Console, CMS admins and chief editors can add (invite) users as editors to the CMS, who can then log in to the corresponding website via this IdP. Once a user has logged in via the IdP, they are redirected to the Scrivito application.

Here, we will be using Auth0 as our identity provider with OpenID Connect support.

For configuring Auth0 as an identity provider, open the Auth0 dashboard and create an application. Make sure to select the “Single Page App” type for visitor authentication, and “Regular Web App” for editor authentication. Then, from the settings tab of the new application, take down the following data as you will need it in step 2 to make your identity provider known to Scrivito:

• Domain, e.g. foobar.eu.auth0.com
• Client ID, e.g. JLSyTv8ReKff8zxz2PdNqkfUpJ37qg6u
• Client Secret …

So far, you have set up an application with your IdP. To complete the process, let’s configure Scrivito to use this IdP for authenticating users.

To add a visitor identity provider, open the Scrivito Dashboard in your browser, select the “Settings” tab of your website, and enter the details in the “Visitor Identity Providers” section.

For an editor identity provider, open the JustRelate Console in your browser, select the “Identity providers” section, and enter the details there.

In both cases, up to 20 identity providers can be configured. Scrivito accepts logins from any of the providers. For each of them, the following pieces of information are required:

• Provider URL: This is the “Domain” value from above, specified as a complete URL, including the HTTPS scheme. For the “foobar.eu.auth0.com” example domain, the provider URL would be “https://foobar.eu.auth0.com/”. For Google as the IdP, it’s always “https://accounts.google.com”.
• Hosted Domains: With Auth0 as your IdP, this field can be left blank because the provider URL already contains your unique account name, “foobar”, as part of the domain. For Google, however, use your GSuite domain name. If your GSuite includes multiple domains, you can specify up to ten of them as a comma-separated list.
• Client ID: The client ID you were given in the IdP setup process.
• Client Secret: The client secret you were given.
• Logout URL: (Only available for editor identity providers.) After a user has logged out from Scrivito, they are still logged in with the IdP, and would be logged in automatically the next time they visit the website because of the automatic OAuth handshake between Scrivito and the IdP. If you are worried that this may irritate the users, you can also log them out from the IdP whenever they log out from Scrivito. For this, specify a logout URL to which Scrivito should redirect for logging the user out from the IdP as well.

With this, we are done with editor authentication. For visitors, your app needs to provide a means to authenticate in order to get access to restricted content.

There are two algorithms identity providers use to generate and validate the signature of a JSON Web Token (JWT), HS256 and RS256. While the HS256 algorithm requires a client secret, RS256 doesn’t (as it is asymmetric), and thus the corresponding field in the Dashboard can be left empty for IdPs using RS256.

Scrivito requires the OpenID Connect IdP to be used to support the openid, email and profile scopes. From these scopes, Scrivito uses the following claims:

In case email, email_verified and name aren’t already included in the ID token, Scrivito fetches these values from the IdP’s “userinfo” endpoint. The URL of this endpoint is provided via the “userinfo_endpoint” key in the IdP’s “.well-known/openid-configuration” data. See Google’s OpenID configuration for an example.