Chapter 1. Understanding authentication and user provisioning

This module provides an overview of how authentication and user provisioning function within Red Hat Developer Hub. Learn about the process from creating user and group entities in the software catalog to user sign-in, and how authentication and catalog plugins enable each step. Understanding this process is essential for successfully configuring your Developer Hub instance, securing access through authorization, and enabling features that rely on synchronized user and group data.

To fully enable catalog features, provision user and group data from the Identity Provider to the Developer Hub software catalog. Catalog provider plugins handle this task asynchronously. These plugins query the Identity Provider (IdP) for relevant user and group information, and create or update corresponding entities in the Developer Hub catalog. Scheduled provisioning ensures that the catalog accurately reflects the users and groups in your organization.

When a user attempts to access Developer Hub, Developer Hub redirects them to a configured authentication provider, such as Red Hat Build of Keycloak (RHBK), GitHub, or Microsoft Azure. This external IdP is responsible for authenticating the user.

On successful authentication, the Developer Hub authentication plugin, configured in your app-config.yaml file, processes the response from the IdP, resolves the identity in the Developer Hub software catalog, and establishes a user session within Developer Hub.

Configuring authentication and user provisioning is critical for several reasons.