SAML 2 with django-allauth

Django-allauth got SAMLv2 support last August. It has been and continues to be an exceptionally complete package for all authentication-related things. SAML in 2024? Sure, it is OAuth or something more modern you would usually want, but as we all know, we only sometimes have that choice. In this post, I will explore how to integrate customer users into a SaaS product using SAML.

The official documentation covers the installation part. It also has an example of configuring it in the settings file. Alternatively, the settings can be stored in the DB.

Often, SAML is used to integrate all users (and roles) from specific organizations. So, if a customer, say, Acme, wants to start using our SaaS product, all their user information often uses the same integration. In this case, Acme wants to use SAML.

Let's slap the configuration to the DB. Here is a screenshot of an example config, viewed through the Django admin. Their identity provider could be anything, and I have filled in the settings with dummy values.

The relevant part is the client_id, the slug in your Django applications allauth SAML URLs. So, all Acme signings are forwarded to their bespoke endpoint to initiate the authentication flow. With default settings, users are redirected to the following URL to complete the SAML authentication flow.

https://yourdjango.com/accounts/saml/acme/login/

Adding Acme's competitor, Initech, would be just a new model instance with a distinct client_id.

Acme also wishes to map their organization user roles to roles provided by your system. That can be done, for example, by creating an adapter that maps the integration's role attributes to the app's attributes.

Comments

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker

"You are a friendly breadwinner"

A recent blog post by Pete Koomen about how we still lack truly "AI-native" software got me thinking about the kinds of applications I’d like to see. As the blog post says, AI should handle the boring stuff and leave the interesting parts for me. I listed down a few tasks I've dealt with recently and wrote some system prompts for potential agentic AIs: Check that the GDPR subprocessor list is up to date. Also, ensure we have a signed data processing agreement in place with the necessary vendors. Write a summary of what you did and highlight any oddities or potentially outdated vendors. Review our product’s public-facing API. Ensure the domain objects are named consistently. Here's a link to our documentation describing the domain. Conduct a SOC 2 audit of our system and write a report with your findings. Send the report to Slack. Once you get approval, start implementing the necessary changes. These could include HR-related updates, changes to cloud infras...

Koodihommia

Search This Blog