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: {}

The above is all you need to get working with the guest provider. However, you can also add additional configuration if you need to such as the following:

app-config.local.yaml

auth:
  providers:
    guest:
      userEntityRef: user:default/john-smith
      ownershipEntityRefs: [group:default/smith-family]
      dangerouslyAllowOutsideDevelopment: false

The userEntityRef is used as the entity reference for the guest user and the ownershipEntityRefs is a list of entity references to use for ownership of the guest user, if the user is not found in the catalog.

The dangerouslyAllowOutsideDevelopment flag is used to allow users to sign in with the guest provider outside of their development environments, e.g. in production.

You can find this information by looking at the config file here.