Visitors logged in to a Scrivito-based website can open pages that have been marked as restricted.
Editors are required to log in to get access to Scrivito’s editing interface. They can authenticate using an identity provider.
Visitors logged in to a Scrivito-based website can open pages that have been marked as restricted.
Editors are required to log in to get access to Scrivito’s editing interface. They can authenticate using an identity provider.
With Scrivito, you can give visitors to your website as well as the editors working on your CMS content the possibility to log in via an identity provider (IdP) supporting OpenID Connect, e.g. Auth0 or Google.
In this guide, we are going to show you how to set up identity providers and make them known to your Scrivito CMS, via the Dashboard for visitors, and via the JustRelate Console for editors. The Console is JustRelate’s account management tool where you can set up and maintain, for example, the users and teams, editor IdPs, API keys, and other details related to your Scrivito-based website. Like all services from JustRelate, the Console uses JustRelate’s unified identity and access management (IAM) service for authorizing editors.
Even though visitor and editor authentication are two completely different stories, setting them up is almost identical, so they are both covered here.
If the “Settings” tab of your Scrivito Dashboard doesn’t include the “Visitor Identity Providers” or “Editor Identity Provider” sections, please have them enabled by our Scrivito Support. The “Editor Identity Provider” section contains nothing but a button for opening the JustRelate Console.
An identity provider (IdP) offers user authentication as a service. For service providers, the main benefit of using IdPs is that the identity of users can be asserted without the need to store and manage their accounts and passwords.
Most people come into contact with identity providers when they click on login form buttons such as “Log in with Google”, for example. For users, it is convenient to be able to bypass login forms, and to not have to maintain dedicated credentials for a further service.
Scrivito works with any identity provider supporting OpenID Connect. You can even connect your own Active Directory or LDAP, as long as they’re configured for OpenID Connect.
OpenID Connect is a widely used authentication service supported by several major cloud platform providers such as Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. So any person with an account at any of these providers can be added as a website visitor or editor to a Scrivito CMS.
OpenID Connect is based on the OpenID 2.0 and OAuth 2.0 protocols. OpenID Connect directly incorporates OAuth 2.0 capabilities. These components are open standards, so you can be confident that your visitors and editors are logged in securely.
For your website to support logging in via a visitor identity provider, three steps need to be made:
Afterwards, only logged-in visitors are given access to website content that is flagged as restricted. Below, we will guide you through the first two steps, the registrations. Making your website fit for logging in via the IdP is covered by the corresponding API documentation.
To set up an editor identity provider, only two steps are required:
Using the Console, CMS admins and chief editors can add (invite) users as editors to the CMS, who can then log in to the corresponding website via this IdP. Once a user has logged in via the IdP, they are redirected to the Scrivito application.
In this section, we will be using Google GSuite as our editor identity provider. Please refer to Google’s OpenID Connect Guide for further details. Further down, we’ll walk through the same setup using Auth0 as our IdP.
First, open the “Credentials” page in the Google API Console. On the “OAuth consent screen”, fill out the form and make sure to enter “scrivito.com” in the “Authorized domains” input field.
Next, click “Create credentials” and select “OAuth client ID”.
On the next screen, select “Web Application” as the “Application Type”, give your new Google OAuth client a name, and provide Scrivito’s authentication callback URL. This piece of information can be found in the “Identity providers” section of your account in the Console:
Copy the authentication callback URL and paste it into Google’s “Authorized redirect URIs” input field.
Google OAuth client: Enter Scrivito's callback URLs as authorized redirect URLs
Next, click “Create” on the Google OAuth client setup page. Make a note of the client ID and secret, as you will need them in step 2:
Next, jump ahead to step 2 and make your identity provider known to your Scrivito CMS.
Here, we will be using Auth0 as our identity provider with OpenID Connect support.
For configuring Auth0 as an identity provider, open the Auth0 dashboard and create an application. Make sure to select the “Single Page App” type for visitor authentication, and “Regular Web App” for editor authentication. Then, from the settings tab of the new application, take down the following data as you will need it in step 2 to make your identity provider known to Scrivito:
foobar.eu.auth0.com
JLSyTv8ReKff8zxz2PdNqkfUpJ37qg6u
For an editor identity provider, Auth0 needs to be provided with Scrivito’s authentication callback URL. This piece of information can be found in the “Identity providers” section of your website in the JustRelate Console. Copy this URL and paste it into Auth0’s “Allowed Callback URLs” input field.
So far, you have set up an application with your IdP. To complete the process, let’s configure Scrivito to use this IdP for authenticating users.
To add a visitor identity provider, open the Scrivito Dashboard in your browser, select the “Settings” tab of your website, and enter the details in the “Visitor Identity Providers” section.
For an editor identity provider, open the JustRelate Console in your browser, select the “Identity providers” section, and enter the details there.
In both cases, up to 20 identity providers can be configured. Scrivito accepts logins from any of the providers. For each of them, the following pieces of information are required:
With this, we are done with editor authentication. For visitors, your app needs to provide a means to authenticate in order to get access to restricted content.
As a default, when logging in to a Scrivito-based website as an editor, Scrivito uses the first editor identity provider from the ones configured in your Console.
With several editor IdPs configured, this default can be overridden by specifying the one to select using the _scrivito_idp
URL parameter, like so:
https://my.website.com/scrivito?_scrivito_idp=https://my.website.idp.com
If you have many websites or support various identity providers, we recommend editors to bookmark the URLs they use most frequently for logging in.
There are two algorithms identity providers use to generate and validate the signature of a JSON Web Token (JWT), HS256 and RS256. While the HS256 algorithm requires a client secret, RS256 doesn’t (as it is asymmetric), and thus the corresponding field in the Dashboard can be left empty for IdPs using RS256.
Scrivito requires the OpenID Connect IdP to be used to support the openid
, email
and profile
scopes. From these scopes, Scrivito uses the following claims:
Scope | Claims used |
---|---|
openid | hd , iss , sub |
email | email , email_verified |
profile | name |
In case email
, email_verified
and name
aren’t already included in the ID token, Scrivito fetches these values from the IdP’s “userinfo” endpoint. The URL of this endpoint is provided via the “userinfo_endpoint” key in the IdP’s “.well-known/openid-configuration” data. See Google’s OpenID configuration for an example.