Okta authentication

Authentication using Okta, a cloud-based identity management service.

To use Okta authentication with Octopus you will need to:

1. Configure Okta to trust your Octopus Deploy instance (by setting it up as an app in Okta).
2. Configure your Octopus Deploy instance to trust and use Okta as an Identity Provider.

Configure Okta

The first steps are to configure Okta to trust your instance of Octopus Deploy by configuring an app in your Okta account.

Configure an app

You must first have an account at Okta. You can sign up for a free developer account.

Once you have an account, log in to the Okta admin portal.

1. Select the Applications tab and click the Create App Integration button.

   

2. Choose Web for the OIDC - OpenID Connect for the Sign-in method and Web Application for the Application type and click the Next button.

   

3. Enter an App integration name like Octopus Deploy and for the Sign-in redirect URIs enter https://octopus.example.com/api/users/authenticatedToken/Okta replacing https://octopus.example.com with the public URL of your Octopus Server, remove any default Sign-out redirect URIs and click the Save button.

   

If you want to allow users to log in directly from Okta then change the Login initiated by to Either Okta or App, set Login flow to Redirect to app to initiate login, and set the Initiate login URI to https://octopus.example.com/#/users/sign-in.

OpenID Connect settings

There are two values you will need from the Okta configuration to complete the Octopus configuration: the Client ID and Issuer. (The Client ID is also referred to as Audience.)

Select the Sign On tab and scroll down to the OpenID Connect ID Token section. Take note of the Issuer and Audience as you will need both these values to configure your Octopus Server.

Okta group integration

If you want Okta groups to flow through to Octopus, you’ll need to change the Groups claim fields as follows:

Note that the Regex is .*, the period is important!

Active Directory integration

If you want to configure Okta to present your active directory groups, use a similar approach to Okta group integration, however we recommend that you use a Groups claim type of Expression instead of Filter.

For example, if you have all of your Octopus groups prefixed with Octopus. (e.g. Octopus.Admins, Octopus.Deployers, etc.) then you could use the following expression to pass along the correct AD groups:

Groups.startsWith("active_directory", "Octopus.", 10)

This expression will search active_directory for any groups that start with the name Octopus. and only return the first 10 results.

A complete guide to Okta’s group expressions are available here

Assign app

Next you will need to assign your app to people or groups within your Okta directory.

1. Select the Assignments tab and click the Assign button. You can assign your app to people, and to groups.

   

2. The app may be assigned to Everyone by default. If not, to assign the app to all users, you can simply assign the default Everyone group to the app, and click Done.

Configure Octopus Server

You will need the Client ID (aka Audience), Client secret and Issuer obtained from the Okta portal as described above.

To configure Octopus to use Okta authentication you’ll need:

• The Client ID, which should be a string value like 0a4b------------9yc3.
• The Client secret, which should be a string value like uJ----------------------------------SS.
• The Issuer, which should be a URL like https://dev-xxxxxx.oktapreview.com.

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

Octopus.Server.exe configure --OktaIsEnabled=true --OktaIssuer=Issuer --OktaClientId=ClientID --OktaClientSecret=ClientSecret

# e.g.
# Octopus.Server.exe configure --OktaIsEnabled=true --OktaIssuer=https://dev-xxxxxx.oktapreview.com --OktaClientId=0a4b------------9yc3 --OktaClientSecret=uJ----------------------------------SS

Alternatively these settings can be defined through the user interface by selecting Configuration ➜ Settings ➜ Okta and populating the fields Issuer, ClientId, ClientSecret and IsEnabled.

Run the command below as an Administrator to configure the scopes OpenId, Profile, Email, and Groups:

octopus.server.exe configure --oktaScope="openid%20profile%20email%20groups"

Octopus user accounts are still required

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.

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 Okta, be sure to check your server logs for warnings.

You can also check Okta logs by clicking the View Logs link on the Okta admin portal.

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 - they matter too!

Check OpenID Connect metadata is working

You can see the OpenID Connect metadata by going to the Issuer address in your browser adding /.well-known/openid-configuration to the end. In our example this would have been something like https://dev-xxxxxx.oktapreview.com/.well-known/openid-configuration

Inspect the contents of the security token

Perhaps the contents of the security token sent back by Okta aren’t exactly the way Octopus expected, especially certain claims which may be missing or named differently. This will usually result in the Okta 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 Okta 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”. In Firefox this is called “Persist Logs”.

   

3. Attempt to sign into Octopus using Okta and find the HTTP POST coming back to your Octopus instance from Okta on a route like /api/users/authenticatedToken/Okta. 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. 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.
6. 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.

Inspect the request to Okta for scope

If your request to Okta does not contain all of the appropriate scopes inside of it, this may result in unexpected behavior when logging into Octopus with Okta. For example, if your request does not have the groups scope, you will not get the appropriate permissions when logging in. To find out if you need to add a scope to your request, you can do the following:

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”. In Firefox this is called “Persist Logs”.

3. Attempt to sign into Octopus using Okta and find the HTTP GET that is sent to Okta. Inside of this request you will see request scopes.

   

4. Within the URL request, look at the scope section. In the example above, you will see the scope includes openid, profile, email, and groups. These are the default scopes Octopus expects. If the scope section of your URL doesn’t contain these four scopes, you will need to remediate this by remoting into the Octopus Server and running the following in a command prompt or PowerShell as an Administrator: octopus.server.exe configure --oktaScope="openid%20profile%20email%20groups"

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Page updated on Sunday, January 1, 2023