>= V0.7

Starting with v0.7, Giles has a two part authentication mechanism. First, it requires applications to send an app token (generated by Giles for a specific app) and the token of an identity provider to authenticate a user. Giles then generates a shorter-lived authentication token specifically for Giles that can be used to use Giles' REST Api on behalf of a user.

To register an application with Giles:

1. Login as administrator. 
2. Go to "Apps" in the main menu and click on the "Register App" button.
3. Enter a name for the application you are registering and select what identity provider your app is using.
4. Click register.

On the next page, Giles will present you with an access token for your app. Make sure to copy it and keep it safe! Once you leave this page, there is no way to retrieve the token from Giles again. For security reasons, Giles does not store access tokens.

OPENID In order to be able to authenticate users via an OpenId Connect token, in addition to the steps described above, any application also needs to register their client id. To do this, go to Giles' system config page and add the client id (not the secret!) that your OpenId provider (currently Google) generated for your application to the list of registered client ids. If you try to authenticate a user with an OpenId token of an unregistered application, Giles will respond with:

{
  "errorCode" : "401",
  "errorMsg" : "AUDIENCE_MISMATCH"
}

Retrieve Giles authentication token

POST

An application can retrieve a new Giles authentication token for a user by making a POST request to the following url:

/rest/token

Giles will expect an app token (generated as described above) in the POST Authorization header prefixed with "token":

Authorization:   token yourAppsAccessToken

The body of your request should contain form-data with a parameter called "providerToken" that contains the token for the user your app is trying to authenticate (e.g. the GitHub token of a user).

If successful, we will get the following response:

{
  "authentication" : "success",
  "token" : "gilesAuthorizationToken"
}

An invalid or missing token, will result in the following response. The provider key/value pair tells you if there was an issue with the Giles app token or the token of your identity provider.

{
  "provider" : "APP_TOKEN_GILES",
  "errorCode" : "401",
  "errorMsg" : "Missing or invalid token."
}

With the returned Giles authentication token, you can now use Giles' REST Api.

Expired Giles Tokens

When sending an expired Giles token, the following response is returned:

{
  "errorCode" : "600",
  "errorMsg" : "The sent token is expired."
}

If that happens, the application sending the request has to retrieve a new Giles access token as described above.