Setting up Single Sign-On with SAML

This article will take you through the process of setting up SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) SSO (Single Sign-on) for your organization.

SAML SSO enables your organization to control access to Sanity projects by using a third-party identity provider, such as Okta, Google, or Azure Active Directory. When you enable SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) SSO (Single Sign-on), users who log into a project through studio or the management interface, will be authenticated through the organization’s identity provider. Once they log in, they will be assigned roles according to rules based on group membership from their user record in the identity provider.

• An organization with a project on Enterprise plan or Growth plan with the SAML SSO add-on.
• An external Identity Provider which supports SAML authentication (e.g., Okta, Google, or Azure AD).
• Organization administrator permissions.

Access your organization's settings by going to sanity.io/manage and select the appropriate organization in the dropdown menu in the upper left corner. Then select the SAML SSO section in the left sidebar, and click the button to create a SAML SSO provider.

A new dialog will appear informing you that SAML SSO has not yet been configured. Click the button labeled Configure to start setting up your provider. This will generate the details needed to connect your identity provider with your organization on Sanity.io.

The process of configuring SAML SSO starts with Sanity providing you with the necessary details for setting up your external identity provider. You can use the copy buttons to put the correct strings on the clipboard. It's also possible to download the settings as a SAML XML file.

Be aware that different providers may use different terminology. Shown here is the interface for entering these details if you're using Okta.com. If you're using Azure AD, please also see the guide to set up SSO authentication with SAML and Azure. Note that “callback URL” is called “Single sign on URL.”

Note the mapping of attributes for user accounts. Sanity requires email, firstName, and lastName to be mapped to corresponding values from the identity provider. id and displayName are optional.

Having set up the external identity provider with the parameters you obtained from Sanity, it is now time to do the reverse. Scroll down to the next section with the heading Your Identity Provider details. Go ahead and fill in the appropriate values.

Scroll to the next section to give your configuration a meaningful name, and choose whether or not to automatically update roles whenever a user logs in. You may also set the length of user sessions to your liking before saving your configuration.

At the bottom of the SAML SSO configuration page you'll be able to define a unique slug that will identify your organization in certain SSO workflows, such as logging in via CLI or logging into the project management console. Note that this setting can also be accessed under General settings, and might therefore already have a value set.

# Example CLI login using the slug 'saml-docs'
sanity login --sso saml-docs

After saving your settings you are ready to move on and enable SSO for one or several of your projects. In the process, you’ll also configure role mapping for each project.

In the role mapping dialog, you’ll set a default fallback role which will be applied to users who don’t belong to any groups matching your mapping rules, as well as rules to map groups from your SSO provider to roles in this project. Role mapping rules are evaluated against the group membership attribute of the user identity on the identity provider, and they support regular expression syntax (observe back references and lookahead assertions are not supported). A few examples are listed below:

• editors will match exactly editors
• .*-admin will match news-admin, sales-admin, -admin and so forth
• [aA]dmin will match admin & Admin

Before setting up your studio to use the new SSO setting, make sure everything is working as expected by visiting the project-specific link provided and log in to your project management console. Copy-paste the Sanity manage project-specific login URL into your browser's address bar. If correctly set up, this will log you out of your current account and into the user account given to you by your SSO identity provider. It might be convenient to test this in another browser.

Next, you'll want to update your Studio to show the login screen from your SSO identity provider by using the Auth API. Instructions for both v3 and v2 studios can be found by expanding the dropdown labeled SAML SSO login for Sanity Studio.

Finally, verify that the configuration work as expected by logging in as a user from your identity provider. Your login screen should list only the appropriate options.

After logging in at least once with SAML SSO, you may want to check your organization's members in the management interface. You'll see a visual indicator on each member's avatar indicating what sign-in-method they use, allowing you to quickly make any adjustments – such as deleting or demoting accounts outside your identity provider domain.