Skip to content

Log in an employee

This how-to guides you through the steps required to ensure that only employees authenticated with Entra ID can access your application.

Prerequisites

Configure your application

Enable the login proxy for Entra ID in your application configuration:

app.yaml
spec:
  azure:
    application:
      enabled: true
    sidecar:
      enabled: true

Login proxy is only available in GCP

Login proxy is only available in GCP clusters, and will not work in on-prem clusters.

See the NAIS application reference for the complete specifications with all possible options.

Grant access to users

By default, no users have access to your application. You must explicitly grant access to either specific groups, all users, or both.

Groups

The following configuration only grants users that are direct members of the specified groups access to your application:

app.yaml
spec:
  azure:
    application:
      enabled: true
      allowAllUsers: false
      claims:
        groups:
          - id: "<group identifier>"

where each group is specified by their unique identifier.

To find your group's identifier, see finding the group identifier.

Warning

Invalid group identifiers are skipped and will not be granted access to your application. Ensure that they are correct and exist in Entra ID.

All users

The following configuration grants all users access your application:

app.yaml
spec:
  azure:
    application:
      enabled: true
      allowAllUsers: true

Groups and all users

If you want to implement custom group-based authorization logic in your application, combine the above two configurations:

app.yaml
spec:
  azure:
    application:
      enabled: true
      allowAllUsers: true
      claims:
        groups:
          - id: "<group identifier>"

This has the following effects:

  • All users will have access to your application
  • If a given user is a direct member of any matching group, the group's identifier will be emitted in the groups claim.

Handle inbound requests

Now that your application is configured, you will need to handle inbound requests in your application code. As long as the employee is authenticated, the Authorization header will include their access_token as a Bearer token.

Your application is responsible for verifying that this token is present and valid. To do so, follow these steps:

Handle missing or empty Authorization header

If the Authorization header is missing or empty, the employee is unauthenticated.

Return an appropriate HTTP status code to the frontend, and redirect the employee's user agent to the login endpoint:

https://<ingress>/oauth2/login

Validate token in Authorization header

If the Authorization header is present, validate the JWT Bearer token within. If invalid, redirect the employee to the login endpoint:

https://<ingress>/oauth2/login

JWT Validation

Validating a JWT involves a number of steps. These steps are outlined and described below in a language- and framework-agnostic way.

Libraries for token validation

We recommend using a library in your language of choice to handle all the validation steps described below. Here are some recommended libraries:

Validation is also supported by many popular frameworks:

To validate the token, start by validating the signature and standard time-related claims.

Additionally, perform the following validations:

Issuer Validation

Validate that the iss claim has a value that is equal to either:

  1. the AZURE_OPENID_CONFIG_ISSUER environment variable, or
  2. the issuer property from the metadata discovery document. The document is found at the endpoint pointed to by the AZURE_APP_WELL_KNOWN_URL environment variable.

Audience Validation

Validate that the aud claim is equal to the AZURE_APP_CLIENT_ID environment variable.

Signature Validation

Validate that the token is signed with a public key published at the JWKS endpoint. This endpoint URI can be found in one of two ways:

  1. the AZURE_OPENID_CONFIG_JWKS_URI environment variable, or
  2. the jwks_uri property from the metadata discovery document. The document is found at the endpoint pointed to by the AZURE_APP_WELL_KNOWN_URL environment variable.

Claims Validation

Other claims may be present in the token. Validation of these claims is optional.

Next steps

The employee is now authenticated and can access your application. However, the subject token found in the Authorization header is only valid for your application.

To consume other APIs on behalf of the employee, exchange the token for a new token that targets a specific API.

🎯 Learn how to consume other APIs on behalf of a employee

📚 Entra ID reference

📚 Login proxy reference