Single Sign-on

You are viewing documentation for a legacy Rasa product. If you want to get started building assistants with Rasa please check out our latest documentation here.

You can configure Rasa Enterprise to use single sign-on (SSO). When a user first signs in, they will be prompted to create a username. New users will be assigned the default role. You can customize the SAML default role by marking one of your roles to be the default role ("Admin" -> "Manage Roles" -> [Role] -> "Edit" -> "Set as default roles").

warning

The usage of the environment variable SAML_DEFAULT_ROLE is deprecated and should be avoided. Please use the UI to configure the default role instead of using the variable.

If set, the environment variable SAML_DEFAULT_ROLE, will overwrite any default role set in the UI.

You have the option to pre-define roles for new SAML users with a known Name ID on the command line by running

cd ${RASA_HOME}

sudo python rasa_x_commands.py create-saml <ROLE> <NAME-ID>

After signing in, new SAML users are prompted to contact the admin if they require extra permissions. An admin can then assign them to a specific role.

Rasa Enterprise supports SSO using the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 protocol.

Configuring SAML SSO for Rasa Enterprise

Rasa Enterprise acts as a service provider (SP) which initiates the SSO request to an external SAML authority, called the identity provider (IdP). This section describes how to configure the Rasa Enterprise SAML SP to work with your enterprise IdP.

Rasa Enterprise mounts SAML certificates, keys and a settings file from your project directory. Create a directory for the authentication information and a directory for storing the configuration file with

cd ${RASA_HOME}

mkdir -pv auth/certs

mkdir -pv auth/saml

The Rasa Enterprise SAML SP requires a X.509 certificate to sign the authentication request. You’ll need to create a certificate and the corresponding private key in ${RASA_HOME}/auth/certs. To do this, run:

cd ${RASA_HOME}/auth/certs

openssl req -new -x509 -days 3652 -nodes -out sp.crt -keyout saml.key

The SAML SP has to be configured using a json file. Create a file called settings.json in ${RASA_HOME}/auth/saml with the following content:

{
"strict": true,
"debug": true,
"sp": {
"entityId": "http://<RASA_ENT_HOST>/api/auth/saml/metadata",
"assertionConsumerService": {
"url": "http://<RASA_ENT_HOST>/api/auth/saml/acs",
"binding": "urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bindings:HTTP-POST"
},
"NameIDFormat": "urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:unspecified"
},
"idp": {
"entityId": "<ENTITY_ID>",
"singleSignOnService": {
"url": "<SSO_URL>",
"binding": "urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bindings:HTTP-Redirect"
},
"x509cert": "<X509_CERT>"
}
}

Replace the following placeholder variables with values specific to your SAML IdP:

RASA_ENT_HOST: The host endpoint that the IdP (provider) will use to connect to Rasa Enterprise. This is configured in Okta in the Single sign on URL and Audience URI values.
ENTITY_ID: Identifier of the IdP identity. Okta provides this endpoint as the Identity Provider Issuer.
SSO_URL: Target URL to which the SSO requests are sent. Okta provides this endpoint as the Identify Provider Single Sign-On URL
X509_CERT: Public X.509 certificate of the IdP. This value should be provided as a string. This SAMLTool page can be used to convert the X.509 certificate to string format.

If you want to activate the SAML endpoint before you have your actual SAML IdP for example for a metadata-based configuration of your IdP, you need to make sure that you use these values with:

ENTITY_ID: is not empty
SSO_URL: has the format of a URL, for example https://example.com
X509_CERT: is not empty

Re-start Rasa Enterprise so that it will read the updated settings.json. Once the rasa-x service has been (re-)started after modifying the SAML settings, you can retrieve the SAML endpoint metadata by issuing this GET command:

curl http://<Rasa Enterprise server host>/api/auth/saml/metadata

You can specify additional details about your IdP in settings.json, as well as in an additional file called advanced_settings.json. Have a look at onelogin’s documentation on python3-saml for more details.

note

First-time SSO users are invited to choose their own username in Rasa Enterprise. This feature relies on a permanent NameID (i.e. the nameid-format cannot be of type transient). For available nameid-format types, please have a look at the section on format identifiers in the SAML 2.0 Name ID specification document.