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External auth with Google

First, you set up your OAuth app and credentials in Google. Then, you use those credentials to configure Google as the external auth provider for the Gloo UI.

Before you begin

  1. Complete the Get started guide to install Gloo Gateway.
  2. Optional: Review the information about how authentication and authorization work with the Gloo UI.

Set up OAuth in Google

Set up Google to accept external auth requests from the Gloo UI. You get credentials that you can use to set up Google as an identity provider (IdP) in Gloo UI.

  1. Log in to the Google Developer Console.
  2. Optional: For first-time users, or to separate your resources from others in your cloud, create a project.
  3. Configure your OAuth consent screen details. If you have an existing consent screen that you want to use, skip to the next step.
    1. From the menu, click OAuth consent screen.
    2. Select the Internal user type, and click Create.
    3. From the OAuth consent screen tab, enter the details of your app.
      • In the App information section, enter a name and email for your app.
      • You can skip the App domain and Authorized domain sections.
      • In the Developer contact information section, enter your email.
      • Click Save and continue.
    4. Optional: From the Scopes tab, you can restrict permissions to particular APIs in your app. For testing purposes, you can skip this section. Click Save and continue.
    5. Review the summary and click Back to dashboard.
  4. Create the credentials to use Google as an OAuth client.
    1. From the menu, click Credentials.
    2. From the Credentials menu bar, click + Create credentials, and then OAuth client ID.
    3. From the Application type dropdown, select Web application. You can optionally rename the client.
    4. In the Authorized redirect URIs section, click + Add URI.
    5. Enter the URL for users to access the Gloo UI. For example, if you expose the UI locally, enter http://localhost:8090/oidc-callback.
    6. Click Create.
  5. Store the Client ID and Client secret values as environment variables. You can also download the client information as a JSON file. 
    export CLIENT_ID=<client-id>
export CLIENT_SECRET=<client-secret>

Configure the dashboard settings for authentication

Configure the Gloo UI to use Google authentication.

  1. Create a Kubernetes secret with the client secret from your Google credentials. Note that the client secret value is base64-encoded.

    kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
type: Opaque
metadata:
  name: dashboard
  namespace: gloo-mesh
data:
  oidc-client-secret: $(echo -n ${CLIENT_SECRET} | base64)
EOF

  2. Create a Dashboard custom resource.

    kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: Dashboard
metadata:
  name: settings
  namespace: gloo-mesh
spec:
  authn:
    oidc:
      appUrl: http://localhost:8090/
      clientId: ${CLIENT_ID}
      clientSecretName: dashboard
      issuerUrl: https://accounts.google.com
EOF

    Review the following table to understand this configuration. For more information, see the API reference.

    Setting Description
    namespace Create the dashboard settings in the same namespace as the Gloo UI deployment (gloo-mesh) in the management cluster.
    authn.oidc Configure the details to set up authentication via an OIDC provider, in this case Google.
    appURL The URL to send the user to after successful authentication: http://localhost:8090/
    clientId The client ID token that you got when you registered your app with the identity provider. In this example, you set the client ID as an environment variable on your local machine in the previous section.
    clientSecretRef The Kubernetes secret that has the client secret that you got when you registered your app with the identity provider. The secret must exist on the same cluster as the ExtAuthServer resource that this policy refers to. In this example, you created the secret in the previous step.
    issuerUrl The URL of the OpenID Connect identity provider. Gloo Gateway automatically discovers the 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://accounts.google.com.

  3. Open the Gloo UI.

    meshctl dashboard

  4. Test that the Gloo UI requires authentication by opening the login URL and clicking **Sign in to Gloo Gateway **. This URL matches the Authorized redirect URIs that you configured in your Google credentials, such as http://localhost:8090/welcome.

Set up authorization with RBAC

You can modify your dashboard settings and RBAC resources so that Google can also be used for authorization. For more information, see RBAC for resources in the UI.

  1. Update the dashboard settings to add the authz option for multicluster RBAC and the authn user mapping. Gloo Gateway extracts the usernameClaim from the Google tokens to map the user to the cluster role binding in RBAC. For more information, see the API reference. 
    kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: Dashboard
metadata:
  name: settings
  namespace: gloo-mesh
spec:
  authz:
     multiClusterRbac: {}
  authn:
    oidc:
      userMapping:
        usernameClaim: "email"
      appUrl: http://localhost:8090/
      clientId: ${CLIENT_ID}
      clientSecretName: dashboard
      issuerUrl: https://accounts.google.com
      scopes:
      - openid
      - profile
      - email
EOF
  2. Configure RBAC cluster roles for the Gloo Gateway resources that you want your user to have. For example, you might add Gloo Gateway resources to existing cluster-admin, edit, and view cluster roles. The following example role gives only view access to the workspace resource. 
    kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  labels:
    test: "true"
  name: test-auth
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
  resources:
  - workspaces
  verbs:
  - get
  - list
  - watch
EOF
  3. Update the cluster role bindings to add the Google account email addresses for the users that you want to give access to. 
    kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: test-auth
  labels:
    test: "true"
subjects:
- kind: User
  name: <user-email@google-org.com>
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
roleRef:
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: test-auth
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
EOF
  4. Repeat the previous RBAC steps for each cluster.
  5. Ask the user to test the Gloo UI authorization by opening the login URL, such as http://localhost:8090/welcome. If prompted, sign in again. The user sees only the resources that are permitted by the RBAC rules.

Cleanup

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

  1. Remove the OIDC authentication section from the dashboard resource.

    kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: admin.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: Dashboard
metadata:
  name: settings
  namespace: gloo-mesh
EOF

  2. Remove the Kubernetes secret with your Okta OIDC credentials.

    kubectl delete secret dashboard -n gloo-mesh

  3. Remove the OIDC credentials in your Google account.

    1. Log in to the Google Developer Console.
    2. From the Credentials, find the credentials that you created earlier and use the trash icon to remove them.

Next steps

Great job on setting up external authentication to the Gloo UI! Now, Gloo Gateway extracts the username in the format expected from the AuthN user mapping from the Google tokens. Then, it matches the username to the cluster role binding in RBAC for authorization.

Next, review this guide to: