Configuring for SAML Authentication

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Warning

Chef Manage is deprecated. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack allows you to define infrastructure, security policies, and application dependencies as code, deliver the stack via an automated pipeline to any platform, and deploy, observe, and manage the stack over its lifecycle. Chef Automate is included as part of the Chef license agreement and is available via subscription.

Chef Manage can support logging in users via SAML authentication. In order to do so, there must be a Chef Automate Server that is configured to act as a SAML Identity Provider (IdP). When the Chef Automate Server is configured to do so, it will provide an OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol end-point that Chef Manage can use to initiate authentication.

Configuring Chef Manage

To configure the Chef Infra Server management console, first add the following code to /etc/chef-manage/manage.rb:

saml.enabled true
saml.issuer_url '<AUTOMATE OIDC ENDPOINT>'

Second, store your OIDC client credentials with using the Secrets Management commands:

$ chef-server-ctl set-secret saml client_id '<CLIENT ID>'
$ chef-server-ctl set-secret saml client_secret '<CLIENT SECRET>'

The issuer_url property should be set to something like 'https://<yourChefAutomateDomain>/api/v0'. Also, the client_id must be known to the Chef Automate server. For development purposes only, you may also need to turn off the TLS verification for the OIDC client by adding

saml.verify_tls false

to your Chef Manage configuration.

Finally, run chef-manage-ctl reconfigure to apply these settings.

Warning

You cannot have both LDAP and SAML authentication enabled at the same time. If you do, the reconfigure will fail with an appropriate error message.