Delegating authentication

SonarQube comes with an onboard user database, as well as the ability to delegate authentication via HTTP Headers, GitHub Authentication, GitLab Authentication, SAML, or LDAP. Each method offers user identity management, group synchronization/mapping, and authentication.

Group mapping

When using group mapping, the following caveats apply regardless of which delegated authentication method is used:

• Membership in synchronized groups will override any membership locally configured in SonarQube at each login
• Membership in a group is synched only if a group with the same name exists in SonarQube
• Membership in the default group sonar-users remains (this is a built-in group) even if the group does not exist in the identity provider

HTTP header authentication

You can delegate user authentication to third-party systems (proxies/servers) using HTTP Header Authentication. See the SSO AUTHENTICATION section within sonar.properties file.

When this feature is activated, SonarQube expects that the authentication is handled prior to any query reaching the server. The tool that handles the authentication should:

• Intercept calls to the SonarQube server
• Take care of the authentication
• Update the HTTP request header with the relevant SonarQube user information
• Re-route the request to SonarQube with the appropriate header information

All the parameters required to activate and configure this feature are available in SonarQube server configuration file (in <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties).

Using HTTP header authentication is an easy way to integrate your SonarQube deployment with an in-house SSO implementation.

GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket Cloud authentication

You can delegate authentication to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket Cloud. See the corresponding DevOps Platform integration page for more information:

• GitHub Enterprise and GitHub.com
• GitLab Self-Managed and GitLab.com
• Bitbucket Cloud

SAML authentication

You can delegate authentication to a SAML 2.0 Identity Provider using SAML Authentication.

Example: Using Keycloak as a SAML identity provider

The following example may be useful if you're using Keycloak as a SAML identity provider. If you're not using Keycloak, your settings are likely to be different.

SAML and reverse proxy configuration

When using SAML, make sure your reverse proxy is properly configured. See Operating the Server for more information.

LDAP Authentication

You can configure SonarQube authentication and authorization to an LDAP server (including LDAP Service of Active Directory) by configuring the correct values in <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties.

The main features are:

• Password checking against the external authentication engine.
• Automatic synchronization of usernames and emails.
• Automatic synchronization of relationships between users and groups (authorization).
• Ability to authenticate against both the external and the internal authentication systems. There is an automatic fallback on SonarQube internal system if the LDAP server is down.
• During the first authentication trial, if the user's password is correct, the SonarQube database is automatically populated with the new user. Each time a user logs into SonarQube, the username, the email and the groups this user belongs to that are refreshed in the SonarQube database. You can choose to have group membership synchronized as well, but this is not the default.

 Y = successfully tested

Setup

• Configure LDAP by editing <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties (see table below).
• Restart the SonarQube server and check the log file for:

INFO org.sonar.INFO Security realm: LDAP ...
INFO o.s.p.l.LdapContextFactory Test LDAP connection: OK

• Log into SonarQube
• On logout users will be presented a login page (/sessions/login), where they can choose to login as technical user or a domain user by passing appropriate credentials

From SonarScanners, we recommend using local technical users for authentication against SonarQube Server.

General configuration

User mapping

Group Mapping Only groups (not roles) and static groups (not dynamic groups) are supported. Click here for more information.

For the delegation of authorization, groups must be first defined in SonarQube. Then, the following properties must be defined to allow SonarQube to automatically synchronize the relationships between users and groups.

Sample configuration

# LDAP configuration
# General Configuration
sonar.security.realm=LDAP
ldap.url=ldap://myserver.mycompany.com
ldap.bindDn=my_bind_dn
ldap.bindPassword=my_bind_password
  
# User Configuration
ldap.user.baseDn=ou=Users,dc=mycompany,dc=com
ldap.user.request=(&(objectClass=inetOrgPerson)(uid={login}))
ldap.user.realNameAttribute=cn
ldap.user.emailAttribute=mail
 
# Group Configuration
ldap.group.baseDn=ou=Groups,dc=sonarsource,dc=com
ldap.group.request=(&(objectClass=posixGroup)(memberUid={uid}))

Advanced LDAP Topics

Authentication methods

• Anonymous - Used when only read-only access to non-protected entries and attributes is needed when binding to the LDAP server.
• Simple Simple authentication is not recommended for production deployments not using the ldaps secure protocol since it sends a cleartext password over the network.
• CRAM-MD5 - The Challenge-Response Authentication Method (CRAM) based on the HMAC-MD5 MAC algorithm (RFC 2195).
• DIGEST-MD5 - This is an improvement on the CRAM-MD5 authentication method (RFC 2831).
• GSSAPI - GSS-API is Generic Security Service API (RFC 2744). One of the most popular security services available for GSS-API is the Kerberos v5, used in Microsoft's Windows 2000 platform.

For a full discussion of LDAP authentication approaches, see RFC 2829 and RFC 2251.

Multiple servers

To configure multiple servers:

# List the different servers
ldap.servers=server1,server2
  
# Configure server1
ldap.server1.url=ldap://server1:1389
ldap.server1.user.baseDn=dc=dept1,dc=com
...
 
# Configure server2
ldap.server2.url=ldap://server2:1389
ldap.server2.user.baseDn=dc=dept2,dc=com
...

Authentication will be tried on each server, in the order that they are listed in the configuration until one succeeds. User/group mapping will be performed against the first server on which the user is found.

Note that all the LDAP servers must be available while (re)starting the SonarQube server.

Migrate users to a new authentication method

If you are changing your delegated authentication method and migrating existing users from your previous authentication method, you can use the api/users/update_identity_provider web API to update your users' identity provider.

Troubleshooting

• Detailed connection logs (and potential error codes received from LDAP server) are output to SonarQube's <SONARQUBE_HOME>/logs/web.log when logging is in DEBUG mode.
• Time out when running SonarQube analysis using LDAP Java parameters are documented here: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/jndi/tutorial/ldap/connect/config.html. Such parameters can be set in sonar.web.javaAdditionalOpts in <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties.

Revoking tokens for deactivated users

When SonarQube authentication is delegated to an external identity provider (LDAP, SAML, GitHub, or GitLab), deactivating a user on the identity provider side does not remove any tokens associated with the user on the SonarQube side. We recommend deactivating the user in SonarQube at Administration > Security > Users by selecting Deactivate from the gear drop-down menu to ensure tokens associated with that user can no longer be used.