⚠ Discourse has successfully integrated with SAML for many enterprises, but SAML integration is often complex, error prone, and typically requires customization / changes for that organization's specific implementation of SAML. This work is best undertaken by software developers familiar with Discourse. We are highly familiar with Discourse, and available to do that work on an enterprise hosting plan.

discourse-saml

A Discourse Plugin to enable authentication via SAML

Setting up your idp: The entity-id should be: http://example.com The consumer assertion service url should be: https://example.com/auth/saml/callback

You may need to set your idp to send an extra custom attribute 'screenName', that will become the users id.

For idp-initated SSO, use the following URL: https://example.com/auth/saml/callback

Configuration

For Docker based installations:

Add the following settings to your app.yml file in the Environment Settings section:

## Saml plugin setting
  DISCOURSE_SAML_TARGET_URL: https://idpvendor.com/saml/login/
  DISCOURSE_SAML_CERT_FINGERPRINT: "43:BB:DA:FF..."
  #DISCOURSE_SAML_REQUEST_METHOD: post
  #DISCOURSE_SAML_FULL_SCREEN_LOGIN: true
  DISCOURSE_SAML_CERT: "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
  ...
  -----END CERTIFICATE-----"

The DISCOURSE_FULL_SCREEN_LOGIN option allows the SSO login page to be presented within the main browser window, rather than a popup. If SAML is your only authentication method this can look neater, as when the user clicks the Log In button the login page will follow through within the main browser window rather than opening a pop-up. This setting is commented out by default - if you want full screen login uncomment that line and set the value to true (as per the example above).

For non docker:

Add the following settings to your discourse.conf file:

• saml_target_url

Supported settings

• DISCOURSE_SAML_SP_CERTIFICATE: SAML Service Provider Certificate
• DISCOURSE_SAML_SP_PRIVATE_KEY: SAML Service Provider Private Key
• DISCOURSE_SAML_AUTHN_REQUESTS_SIGNED: defaults to false
• DISCOURSE_SAML_WANT_ASSERTIONS_SIGNED: defaults to false
• DISCOURSE_SAML_NAME_IDENTIFIER_FORMAT: defaults to "urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:protocol"
• DISCOURSE_SAML_DEFAULT_EMAILS_VALID: defaults to true
• DISCOURSE_SAML_VALIDATE_EMAIL_FIELDS: defaults to blank. This setting accepts pipe separated group names that are supplied in memberOf attribute in SAML payload. If the group name specified in the value matches that from memberOf attribute than the email_valid is set to true, otherwise it defaults to false. This setting overrides DISCOURSE_SAML_DEFAULT_EMAILS_VALID.

Convering an RSA Key to a PEM

If the idp has an RSA key split up as modulus and exponent, this javascript library makes it easy to convert to pem:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/rsa-pem-from-mod-exp

License

MIT