Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

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

Extracting object properties from an IFC file with IfcOpenShell

Besides the object geometry information, IFC files may contain properties for the IFC objects. The properties can be, for example, some predefined dimension information such as an object volume or a choice of material. Some of the properties are predefined in the IFC standards, but custom ones can be added. IFC files can be massive and resource-intensive to process, so in some cases, it helps to separate the object properties from the geometry data. IfcOpenShell  is a toolset for processing IFC files. It is written mostly in C++ but also provides a Python interface. To read an IFC file >>> ifc_file = ifcopenshell.open("model.ifc") Fetch all objects of type IfcSlab >>> slab = ifc_file.by_type("IfcSlab")[1] Get the list of properties >>> slab.IsDefinedBy (#145075=IfcRelDefinesByType('2_fok0__fAcBZmMlQcYwie',#1,$,$,(#27,#59),#145074), #145140=IfcRelDefinesByProperties('3U2LyORgXC2f_hWf6I16C1',#1,$,$,(#27,#59),#145141), #145142

Canyon Precede:ON 7

I bought or technically leased a Canyon Precede:ON 7 (2022) electric bike last fall. This post is about my experiences with it after riding for about 2000 km this winter. The season was a bit colder than usual, and we had more snow than in years, so I properly put the bike through its paces. I've been cycling for almost 20 years. I've never owned a car nor used public transport regularly. I pedal all distances below 30km in all seasons. Besides commuting, I've mountain biked and raced BMX, and I still actively ride my road bike during the spring and summer months. I've owned a handful of bikes and kept them until their frames failed. Buying new bikes or gear has not been a major part of my hobby, and frankly, I'm quite sceptical about the benefits of updating bikes or gear frequently. I've never owned an E-bike before, but I've rented one a couple of times. The bike arrived in a hilariously large box. I suppose there's no need to worry about damage durin