Guest Authentication Provider

Audience: Admins or developers

Summary

The goal of this guide is to get you set up with a guest authentication provider that emits tokens. This is different than the old guest authentication that is purely stored on the frontend and does not have tokens. The main reason you'd want to use this provider is to use permissioned plugins.

caution

This provider should only ever be enabled for development. To prevent unauthorized access to your data, this package is explicitly disabled for non-development environments.

Installation

Backend

note

This will only work with the new backend system. There is no support for this in the old backend.

Add the @backstage/plugin-auth-backend-module-guest-provider to your backend installation.

From your Backstage root directory

yarn --cwd packages/backend add @backstage/plugin-auth-backend-module-guest-provider

Then, add it to your backend's source,

packages/backend/src/index.ts

const backend = createBackend();

backend.add(import('@backstage/plugin-auth-backend'));
backend.add(import('@backstage/plugin-auth-backend-module-guest-provider'));

await backend.start();

Frontend

Add the following to your SignInPage providers,

const providers = [
  'guest',
  ...
]

Config

Similar to the other authentication providers, you have to enable the provider in config. Add the following to your app-config.local.yaml,

app-config.local.yaml

auth:
  providers:
    guest: {}