Amazon Web Services Cognito

Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your GitLab instance. The following documentation enables Cognito as an OAuth 2.0 provider.

Configure AWS Cognito

To enable the AWS Cognito OAuth 2.0 OmniAuth provider, register your application with Cognito. This process generates a Client ID and Client Secret for your application. To enable AWS Cognito as an authentication provider, complete the following steps. You can modify any settings you configure later.

  1. Sign in to the AWS console.
  2. From the Services menu, select Cognito.
  3. Select Manage User Pools and then in the upper-right corner, select Create a user pool.
  4. Enter the user pool name and then select Step through settings.
  5. Under How do you want your end users to sign in?, select Email address or phone number and Allow email addresses.
  6. Under Which standard attributes do you want to require?, select email.
  7. Configure the remaining settings to suit your needs. In the basic setup, these settings do not affect GitLab configuration.
  8. In the App clients settings:
    1. Select Add an app client.
    2. Add the App client name.
    3. Select the Enable username password based authentication checkbox.
  9. Select Create app client.
  10. Set up the AWS Lambda functions for sending emails and finish creating the user pool.

  11. After creating the user pool, go to App client settings and provide the required information:

    • Enabled Identity Providers - select all
    • Callback URL - https://<your_gitlab_instance_url>/users/auth/cognito/callback
    • Allowed OAuth Flows - Authorization code grant
    • Allowed OAuth 2.0 Scopes - email, openid, and profile
  12. Save changes for the app client settings.
  13. Under Domain name, include the AWS domain name for your AWS Cognito application.
  14. Under App Clients, find your app client ID. Select *Show details to display the app client secret. These values correspond to the OAuth 2.0 Client ID and Client Secret. Save these values.

Configure GitLab

  1. Edit the common configuration file settings to add cognito as a single sign-on provider. This enables Just-In-Time account provisioning for users who do not have an existing GitLab account.

  2. On your GitLab server, open the configuration file.

    For Omnibus installations 

    sudo editor /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb

  3. In the following code block, enter your AWS Cognito application information in the following parameters:

    • app_id: Your client ID.
    • app_secret: Your client secret.
    • site: Your Amazon domain and region.

    Include the code block in the /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb file: 

    gitlab_rails['omniauth_allow_single_sign_on'] = ['cognito']
gitlab_rails['omniauth_providers'] = [
  {
    name: "cognito",
    label: "Provider name", # optional label for login button, defaults to "Cognito"
    icon: nil,   # Optional icon URL
    app_id: "<client_id>",
    app_secret: "<client_secret>",
    args: {
      scope: "openid profile email",
      client_options: {
        site: "https://<your_domain>.auth.<your_region>.amazoncognito.com",
        authorize_url: "/oauth2/authorize",
        token_url: "/oauth2/token",
        user_info_url: "/oauth2/userInfo"
      },
      user_response_structure: {
        root_path: [],
        id_path: ["sub"],
        attributes: { nickname: "email", name: "email", email: "email" }
      },
      name: "cognito",
      strategy_class: "OmniAuth::Strategies::OAuth2Generic"
    }
  }
]
  4. Save the configuration file.
  5. Save the file and reconfigure GitLab for the changes to take effect.

Your sign-in page should now display a Cognito option below the regular sign-in form. Select this option to begin the authentication process. AWS Cognito then asks you to sign in and authorize the GitLab application. If the authorization is successful, you’re redirected and signed in to your GitLab instance.

For more information, see Configure common settings.