Use Auth0 as an Identity and Access Management (IAM) provider with Gloo Gateway. Auth0 provides a consistent OpenID Connect (OIDC) interface across your identity providers (IdPs). Your Auth0 users can authenticate to your apps by using credentials that Auth0 manages.

You can adapt these steps for other IAM providers. For more information and options, see About OAuth.

Before you begin

  1. Follow the Get started guide to install Gloo Gateway, set up a gateway resource, and deploy the httpbin sample app.

  2. Get the external address of the gateway and save it in an environment variable.

      export INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-system gloo-proxy-http -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}")
echo $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS  
  
      kubectl port-forward deployment/gloo-proxy-http -n gloo-system 8080:8080

Step 1: Set up your Auth0 account

Set up your Auth0 account, including user credentials to test with.

  1. If you do not already have one, sign up for an Auth0 account. After signup, you can access the Auth0 management dashboard through a personalized URL with your tenant domain name, such as https://manage.auth0.com/dashboard/us/solo-io/.
  2. From the Auth0 dashboard menu, go to User Management > Users.
  3. Click + Create User and fill out the email and password details. The test user gets an email to confirm the account.

Step 2: Create an Auth0 application

Create an Auth0 application that you integrate with the Gloo Gateway external auth server. The following example uses Auth0’s Regular Web Application template as a quick test, but you can adapt the steps to other templates. For more information, see the Auth0 docs.

  1. From the Auth0 dashboard menu, go to Applications > Applications.
  2. Click +Create Application.
  3. Click Regular Web Application and enter a name for your app, such as Solo Test.
  4. From the the Settings tab, in the Basic information, save the following values as environment variables.
    • Domain, such as <tenant>.us.auth0.com:
        export DOMAIN=<domain>
    • Client ID:
        export CLIENT_ID=<client_id>
    • Client secret:
        export CLIENT_SECRET=<client_secret>
  5. Scroll down to the Application URIs section.
  6. In the Allowed Callback URLs section, enter the URL for Auth0 to redirect a user to after authenticating, such as http://extauth.example.com:8080/callback. Later, you configure the extauth.example.com domain in the HTTPRoute for the example httpbin app.
  7. In the footer, click Save Changes.

Figure: Auth0 example app setup
Figure: Auth0 example app setup
Figure: Auth0 example app setup
Figure: Auth0 example app setup

Step 3: Create an OAuth policy

Create the resources needed to enforce an OAuth policy that uses Auth0 as the IAM provider.

  1. In the workload cluster that you want to create the OAuth policy in, store the client credentials of your Auth0 app in a Kubernetes secret.

      kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: auth0
  namespace: httpbin
type: extauth.solo.io/oauth
stringData:
  client-secret: ${CLIENT_SECRET}
EOF

  2. Create an AuthConfig resource with your external authentication rules. The following example sets up authentication with Auth0 via an authorization code. For more options, see the OAuth2 API docs.

      kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: enterprise.gloo.solo.io/v1
kind: AuthConfig
metadata:
  name: oauth-auth0
  namespace: httpbin
spec:
  configs:
  - oauth2:
      oidcAuthorizationCode:
        appUrl: http://extauth.example.com:8080
        callbackPath: /callback
        clientId: ${CLIENT_ID}
        clientSecretRef:
          name: auth0
          namespace: httpbin
        issuerUrl: https://${DOMAIN}
        session:
          cookieOptions:
            notSecure: true
        scopes:
        - email
EOF

    Review the following table to understand this configuration.

    SettingDescription
    oauth2Configure the OAuth 2.0 protocol details to use to authenticate requests. The example uses Google as the external identity provider.
    appUrlThe public URL of the app that you want to set up external auth for. This setting is used in combination with the callbackPath attribute. In this example, you did not configure Google OAuth with a public URL. Instead, you can use http://extauth.example.com:8080 to test the authentication setup.
    callbackPathThe callback path, relative to the appUrl setting. After a user authenticates, the identity provider redirects the user to this callback URL. Gloo Gateway intercepts requests with this path, exchanges the authorization code received from the IAM provider for an ID token, places the ID token in a cookie on the request, and forwards the request to its original destination.
    clientIdThe client ID token that you got when you registered your app with the identity provider.
    clientSecretRefThe Kubernetes secret that has the client secret that you got when you registered your app with the identity provider.
    issuerUrlThe URL of the OpenID Connect identity provider. Gloo Gateway automatically discovers OIDC configuration by querying the .well-known/openid-configuration endpoint on the issuer_url. In this example, Gloo Gateway expects to find OIDC discovery information at https://${DOMAIN}.
    sessionDetails on how to store the user session details. In this example, the cookie is insecure, for demonstration purposes.
    scopesOther OIDC scopes to request. By default, the openid scope is included, which returns the OIDC protocol information that is needed to verify the user’s identity. This example also requests the email scope, which has the user’s Google email address. For more information, see the OpenID docs.

  3. Create a RouteOption resource that refers to the AuthConfig resource that you just created.

      kubectl apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: RouteOption
metadata:
  name: httpbin-oauth
  namespace: httpbin
spec:
  options:
    extauth:
      configRef:
        name: oauth-auth0
        namespace: httpbin
EOF

  4. Create an HTTPRoute resource for the httpbin app that requires authentication with Google for requests along the / path. After the user is successfully authenticated with Google, an access token is issued and the user is redirected to the callback path (/callback) that you defined in the AuthConfig resource. Because the HTTPRoute matches on the / prefix path, it also matches requests along the callback path. The access token that is included in the callback path includes the original prefix path of the request. The external auth server is configured to extract the original request path and to redirect the user back to this path.

      
kubectl apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: httpbin-oauth-route
  namespace: httpbin
spec:
  parentRefs:
    - name: http
      namespace: gloo-system
  hostnames:
    - extauth.example.com
  rules:
    - matches:
      - path:
          type: PathPrefix
          value: /
      filters:
        - type: ExtensionRef
          extensionRef:
            group: gateway.solo.io
            kind: RouteOption
            name: httpbin-oauth
      backendRefs:
        - name: httpbin
          port: 8000
EOF

Step 4: Verify the OAuth policy

  1. Verify that your resources are in an Accepted state. If not, review the messages. Common issues include referencing the wrong RouteOption resource in the extensionRef filter, creating multiple RouteOption resources and attaching them via the targetRefs option, or missing ReferenceGrants for resources that are in different namespaces.

      kubectl describe AuthConfig -n httpbin oauth-auth0
kubectl describe RouteOption -n httpbin httpbin-oauth
kubectl describe HttpRoute -n httpbin httpbin-oauth-route

  2. Update the /etc/hosts file on your local machine to match the $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS to the extauth.example.com host.

    1. Open the /etc/hosts file.

        sudo vi /etc/hosts

    2. Match the extauth.example.com host to the $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS. For example, if $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS is 34.2.1.2, add the following snippet to your /etc/hosts file.

        34.2.1.2   extauth.example.com

  3. In your browser, open any path to your app. For example, you might use http://extauth.example.com:8080/anything as your app URL. Verify that you are redirected to the Auth0 login screen.

    Figure: Auth0 login page
    Figure: Auth0 login page
    Figure: Auth0 login page
    Figure: Auth0 login page

  4. Log in to Auth0 with the credentials of your test user. Verify that you are redirected to the /callback path, with the access token from Auth0 added as a query string in the URL. Because the callback path is included in the / matcher, the external auth server continues to process the request and extracts the original prefix path from the callback URL. Then, the request is forwarded to the httpbin app along the original prefix path (/anything).

    • Example web page content: Notice that the Auth0 ID and access tokens are included in the Cookie header.
      {
  "args": {},
  "headers": {
    "Accept": [
      "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8"
    ],
    "Accept-Encoding": [
      "gzip, deflate"
    ],
    "Accept-Language": [
      "en-US,en;q=0.9"
    ],
    "Cookie": [
      "id_token=eyJh....; access_token=eyJhb..."
    ],
    "Host": [
      "extauth.example.com:8080"
    ],
    "Sec-Gpc": [
      "1"
    ],
    "Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": [
      "1"
    ],
    "User-Agent": [
      "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
    ],
    "X-Envoy-Expected-Rq-Timeout-Ms": [
      "15000"
    ],
    "X-Forwarded-Proto": [
      "http"
    ],
    "X-Request-Id": [
      "58xxxxxx-2xxx-4xxx-bxx-4xxxxxxxx"
    ],
    "X-User-Id": [
      "https://${DOMAIN}.us.auth0.com/;auth0|xxx"
    ]
  },
  "origin": "10.xx.x.xx:46xxx",
  "url": "http://extauth.example.com:8080/anything",
  "data": "",
  "files": null,
  "form": null,
  "json": null
}

Cleanup

You can optionally remove the resources that you set up as part of this guide.

  kubectl delete Secret -n httpbin auth0
kubectl delete AuthConfig -n httpbin oauth-auth0
kubectl delete RouteOption -n httpbin httpbin-oauth
kubectl delete HttpRoute -n httpbin httpbin-oauth-route