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Cloudflare Access Provider

Similar to GCP IAP Proxy Provider or AWS ALB provider, developers can offload authentication support to Cloudflare Access.

This tutorial shows how to use authentication on Cloudflare Access sitting in front of Backstage.

It is assumed a Cloudflare tunnel is already serving traffic in front of a Backstage instance configured to serve the frontend app from the backend and is already gated using Cloudflare Access.

Configuration​

Let's start by adding the following auth configuration in your app-config.yaml or app-config.production.yaml or similar:

auth:
  providers:
    cfaccess:
      # You can find the team name in the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard.
      teamName: <Team Name>
      # This service tokens section is optional -- you only need it if you have
      # some Cloudflare Service Tokens that you want to be able to log in to your
      # Backstage instance.
      serviceTokens:
        - token: '1uh2fh19efvfh129f1f919u21f2f19jf2.access'
          subject: 'bot-user@your-company.com'
      # You can customize the header name that contains the jwt token, by default
      # cf-access-jwt-assertion is used
      jwtHeaderName: <my-header>
      # You can customize the authorization cookie name, by default
      # CF_Authorization is used
      authorizationCookieName: <MY_CAUTHORIZATION_COOKIE_NAME>
      # This picks what sign in resolver(s) you want to use.
      signIn:
        resolvers:
          # See https://backstage.io/docs/auth/cloudflare/provider#resolvers for more resolvers
          - resolver: emailMatchingUserEntityProfileEmail

This config section must be in place for the provider to load at all.

Resolvers​

This provider includes several resolvers out of the box that you can use:

  • emailMatchingUserEntityProfileEmail: Matches the email address from the auth provider with the User entity that has a matching spec.profile.email. If no match is found it will throw a NotFoundError.
  • emailLocalPartMatchingUserEntityName: Matches the local part of the email address from the auth provider with the User entity that has a matching name. If no match is found it will throw a NotFoundError.
Note

The resolvers will be tried in order, but will only be skipped if they throw a NotFoundError.

If these resolvers do not fit your needs you can build a custom resolver, this is covered in the Building Custom Resolvers section of the Sign-in Identities and Resolvers documentation.

Backend Installation​

To add the provider to the backend we will first need to install the package by running this command:

from your Backstage root directory
yarn --cwd packages/backend add @backstage/plugin-auth-backend-module-cloudflare-access-provider

Then we will need to add this line:

in packages/backend/src/index.ts
backend.add(import('@backstage/plugin-auth-backend'));
backend.add(
  import('@backstage/plugin-auth-backend-module-cloudflare-access-provider'),
);

Adding the provider to the Backstage frontend​

See Sign-In with Proxy Providers for pointers on how to set up the sign-in page, and to also make it work smoothly for local development. You'll use cfaccess as the provider name.

If you provide a custom sign in resolver, you can skip the signIn block entirely.