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

Bird is causing high CPU on my macOS

There is no lack of people complaining about MacOS Tahoe, mostly about rounded corners and inconsistent design decisions. I have not paid that much attentention to that, but there is one mac bug i have paid attention to. It hasn't been a visual or ux but rather few system processes pegging the CPU. trustd , alongside with ecosystemd and ecosystemanalyticsd all reported high CPU usage. I can't exactly recall when this started, it might have predated my Tahoe upgrade but anyway, the trio of processes all had high CPU usage. Sure, it may have been the virtual efficiency cores and whether it affeced battery life or slowed down other processes i don't know to be hon...

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...

How my work has changed in the past few years

When I started at my current job 3ish years ago, we had nothing but a few PowerPoint slides and a Figma prototype. I recall talking with one of the founders, whom I had worked with some 10 years ago, and pointing out that the very next step after PowerPoint and Figma was still the same as it had always been: translating those slides and mockups into CRUDs, forms, and other basic building blocks. Sure, all the new fancy tools and frameworks (we had jQuery then) help, but I still had to tinker with very basic primitives like tables and forms. I could not just say, "here is a table, here is a form." Well, yes, technically I could, but I still needed to write a lot of code to make a working form or table. This was around the time of GPT-3, Copilot beta, and very early Cursor. I did attempt to use them, but they could only perform very basic tasks and were pretty much useless for frontend work. We, being one of the first-wave "ChatGPT wrapper" startups has naturally pus...

Koodihommia

Search This Blog