Configuring Local Authentication

This topic describes how to configure your team's authentication using Local Users.

Overview

Continuous integration servers often contain many secrets that let them access source code and deploy apps. It is important that those secrets remain well guarded. Concourse provides options for both authentication and authorization to give you control over who can access your server and how much they can see.

Any number of the following providers can be enabled at any one time. Users are given a choice when logging in as to which one they want to use.

Note: If you access your Concourse server over the public internet, then consider using TLS to secure your connection to the web node.

Configuring team authentication in Concourse is done in two parts:

1. Configure the allowed authentication providers in the deployment manifest. See Configure Authentication Providers below.
2. Add users and groups to Concourse teams using fly set-team. See Add Users and Groups to Teams below.

Configure Authentication Providers

Concourse can be configured to use local users, GitHub, generic LDAP, Cloud Foundry, OAuth, and OIDC as authentication providers. You must specify the allowed authentication providers before Concourse is deployed.

A Concourse operator needs to provide the following information in their Concourse deployment manifest:

• A list of allowed local users
• Configurations against third-party authentication providers (GitHub, generic LDAP, Cloud Foundry, OAuth, and OIDC)
• Users who should be members of the default main team (either local users or users/groups from external authentication providers)

Local Users

Local users must be declared in the add_local_users of the atc job in the deployment manifest. Passwords can be supplied in plaintext or as a bcrypted string (minimum 10 rounds).

Example:

- user1:password1
- user2:$2y$10$W9542XKXzG5aedX09AlSg.nr0IwejlWosCWXzRKl1eOFzdpgOrGcG

Note:user1 and user2 mentioned above do not yet have access to any teams. They must be granted access on a team-by-team basis. For more information, see Add Users and Groups to Teams below.

The Main Team

By default, Concourse comes with a single team called main. The main team is an admin team. This means it can create and update other teams. Currently there is no way to promote a team to become an admin team, so main is a special team.

Concourse requires you to specify at least one user/group to be a member of the main team during deployment. The list of allowed users, groups, and orgs are managed through the main_team property in the ATC job. For more information about this property, see main_team in the BOSH documentation.

An example of adding a local user to the main team can be found in the add-local-users.yml file in the concourse-bosh-deployment GitHub repository.

The values set in the authentication flags take effect whenever the ATC starts up. This allows Concourse to be deployed against declared configurations. It also makes sure that members of the main team do not get locked out of their Concourse.

Add Users and Groups to Teams

Local Users

You can grant local users access to a team using the --local-user flag:

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Enter the following command:
   

   $  fly set-team -n YOUR-TEAM --local-user USERNAME
   

Team Configuration Details

Team members can view the authentication settings of the teams they belong to by using the fly teams -d command.

For example, the command below:

$ fly -t prod teams -d

The output is similar to the following:

name     users
main     local:User