GoogleApps authentication

To use GoogleApps authentication with Octopus Server, GoogleApps must be configured to trust Octopus - by setting it up as an app. This section covers the details on how to configure the app.

Configure GoogleApps

Configure an app

To configure an app within GoogleApps, you must have a Developer account at https://developers.google.com. This account will own the app configuration, so we recommend you create an account for company use, rather than using an individual account.

Once you have an account, log in to https://console.developers.google.com and the following actions:

1. Create a project for Octopus (this might take a minute or so) and then within that project
2. Select APIs & Services ➜ Credentials menu.
3. Set the OAuth consent screen information. In the Application Logo box, upload a logo to make it easy to identify the application. You can download the Octopus logo here.
4. Add the Top Level Domain of your Octopus instance to the Authorized domains list. If you are setting Google Apps up for Hosted Octopus this will be octopus.app or octopus.com.
5. Select the Credentials tab and Create a new OAuth client ID for a Web app.
6. Enter a Name for identification, e.g. Octopus. This is the name that will appear when the user is asked to allow access to their details.
7. Add https://octopus.example.com/api/users/authenticatedToken/GoogleApps (replacing https://octopus.example.com with the url of your Octopus Server) to the Authorized Redirect URIs.

Configure Octopus Server

You can configure the GoogleApps settings from the command line. You will need the Client ID and Client secret from the Credentials tab and your hosted domain name.

Once you have those values, run the following from a command prompt in the folder where you installed Octopus Server:

Octopus.Server.exe configure --googleAppsIsEnabled=true --googleAppsClientId=ClientID --googleAppsClientSecret=ClientSecret --googleAppsHostedDomain=yourdomain.com

Alternatively these settings can be defined through the user interface by selecting Configuration ➜ Settings ➜ GoogleApps and populating the fields Is Enabled, Hosted Domain, Client ID and Client Secret.

Octopus user accounts are still required

Even if you are using an external identity provider, Octopus still requires a user account so you can assign those people to Octopus teams and subsequently grant permissions to Octopus resources. Octopus will automatically create a user account based on the profile information returned in the security token, which includes an Identifier, Name, and Email Address.

How Octopus matches external identities to user accounts When the security token is returned from the external identity provider, Octopus looks for a user account with a matching Identifier. If there is no match, Octopus looks for a user account with a matching Email Address. If a user account is found, the External Identifier will be added to the user account for next time. If a user account is not found, Octopus will create one using the profile information in the security token.

Getting permissions

If you are installing a clean instance of Octopus Deploy you will need to seed it with at least one admin user. This user will have access to create and configure other users as required. To add a user, execute the following command

Octopus.Server.exe admin --username USERNAME --email EMAIL

The most important part of this command is the email, as usernames are not necessarily included in the claims from the external providers. When the user logs in the matching logic must be able to align their user record based on the email from the external provider or they will not be granted permissions.

Troubleshooting

We do our best to log warnings to your Octopus Server log whenever possible. If you are having difficulty configuring Octopus to authenticate with GoogleApps, be sure to check your server logs for warnings.

Double and triple check your configuration

Unfortunately security-related configuration is sensitive to everything. Make sure:

• You don’t have any typos or copy-paste errors.
• Remember things are case-sensitive.
• Remember to remove or add slash characters as we’ve instructed - they matter too!

Check OpenID Connect metadata is working

You can see the OpenID Connect metadata by going to https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/openid-configuration.

Inspect the contents of the security token

Perhaps the contents of the security token sent back by GoogleApps aren’t exactly the way Octopus expected, especially certain claims which may be missing or named differently. This will usually result in the GoogleApps user incorrectly mapping to a different Octopus User than expected. The best way to diagnose this is to inspect the JSON Web Token (JWT) which is sent from GoogleApps to Octopus via your browser. To inspect the contents of your security token:

1. Open the Developer Tools of your browser and enable Network logging making sure the network logging is preserved across requests.
2. In Chrome Dev Tools this is called “Preserve Log”:

3. Attempt to sign into Octopus using GoogleApps and find the HTTP POST coming back to your Octopus instance from GoogleApps on a route like /api/users/authenticatedToken/GoogleApps. You should see an id_token field in the HTTP POST body.

4. Grab the contents of the id_token field and paste that into https://jwt.io/ which will decode the token for you.

5. Don’t worry if jwt.io complains about the token signature, it doesn’t support RS256 which is used by GoogleApps.
6. Octopus uses most of the data to validate the token, but primarily uses the sub, email and name claims. If these claims are not present you will likely see unexpected behavior.
7. If you are not able to figure out what is going wrong, please send a copy of the decoded payload to our support team and let them know what behavior you are experiencing.

Help us continuously improve

Please let us know if you have any feedback about this page.

Send feedback

Page updated on Sunday, January 1, 2023