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DocumentationGrafana documentationSetupConfigure securityConfigure authenticationConfigure GitLab OAuth2 authentication

Configure GitLab OAuth2 authentication

To enable GitLab OAuth2 you must register the application in GitLab. GitLab will generate a client ID and secret key for you to use.

Create GitLab OAuth keys

You need to create a GitLab OAuth application. Choose a descriptive Name, and use the following Redirect URI:

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https://grafana.example.com/login/gitlab

where https://grafana.example.com is the URL you use to connect to Grafana. Adjust it as needed if you don’t use HTTPS or if you use a different port; for instance, if you access Grafana at http://203.0.113.31:3000, you should use

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http://203.0.113.31:3000/login/gitlab

Finally, select read_api as the scope and submit the form. Note that if you’re not going to use GitLab groups for authorization (i.e. not setting allowed_groups, see below), you can select read_user instead of read_api as the scope, thus giving a more restricted access to your GitLab API.

You’ll get an Application Id and a Secret in return; we’ll call them GITLAB_APPLICATION_ID and GITLAB_SECRET respectively for the rest of this section.

Enable GitLab in Grafana

Add the following to your Grafana configuration file to enable GitLab authentication:

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[auth.gitlab]
enabled = true
allow_sign_up = true
auto_login = false
client_id = GITLAB_APPLICATION_ID
client_secret = GITLAB_SECRET
scopes = read_api
auth_url = https://gitlab.com/oauth/authorize
token_url = https://gitlab.com/oauth/token
api_url = https://gitlab.com/api/v4
allowed_groups =
role_attribute_path =
role_attribute_strict = false
allow_assign_grafana_admin = false
tls_skip_verify_insecure = false
tls_client_cert =
tls_client_key =
tls_client_ca =
use_pkce = true

You may have to set the root_url option of [server] for the callback URL to be correct. For example in case you are serving Grafana behind a proxy.

Restart the Grafana backend for your changes to take effect.

If you use your own instance of GitLab instead of gitlab.com, adjust auth_url, token_url and api_url accordingly by replacing the gitlab.com hostname with your own.

With allow_sign_up set to false, only existing users will be able to login using their GitLab account, but with allow_sign_up set to true, any user who can authenticate on GitLab will be able to login on your Grafana instance; if you use the public gitlab.com, it means anyone in the world would be able to login on your Grafana instance.

You can limit access to only members of a given group or list of groups by setting the allowed_groups option.

You can also specify the SSL/TLS configuration used by the client.

• Set tls_client_cert to the path of the certificate.
• Set tls_client_key to the path containing the key.
• Set tls_client_ca to the path containing a trusted certificate authority list.

tls_skip_verify_insecure controls whether a client verifies the server’s certificate chain and host name. If it is true, then SSL/TLS accepts any certificate presented by the server and any host name in that certificate. You should only use this for testing, because this mode leaves SSL/TLS susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Configure refresh token

Available in Grafana v9.3 and later versions.

Note: This feature is behind the accessTokenExpirationCheck feature toggle.

When a user logs in using an OAuth provider, Grafana verifies that the access token has not expired. When an access token expires, Grafana uses the provided refresh token (if any exists) to obtain a new access token.

Grafana uses a refresh token to obtain a new access token without requiring the user to log in again. If a refresh token doesn’t exist, Grafana logs the user out of the system after the access token has expired.

By default, GitLab provides a refresh token.

allowed_groups

To limit access to authenticated users that are members of one or more GitLab groups, set allowed_groups to a comma- or space-separated list of groups. For instance, if you want to only give access to members of the example group, set

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allowed_groups = example

If you want to also give access to members of the subgroup bar, which is in the group foo, set

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allowed_groups = example, foo/bar

To put values containing spaces in the list, use the following JSON syntax:

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allowed_groups = ["Admins", "Software Engineers"]

Note that in GitLab, the group or subgroup name doesn’t always match its display name, especially if the display name contains spaces or special characters. Make sure you always use the group or subgroup name as it appears in the URL of the group or subgroup.

Here’s a complete example with allow_sign_up enabled, with access limited to the example and foo/bar groups. The example also promotes all GitLab Admins to Grafana organization admins:

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[auth.gitlab]
enabled = true
allow_sign_up = true
auto_login = false
client_id = GITLAB_APPLICATION_ID
client_secret = GITLAB_SECRET
scopes = read_api
auth_url = https://gitlab.com/oauth/authorize
token_url = https://gitlab.com/oauth/token
api_url = https://gitlab.com/api/v4
allowed_groups = example, foo/bar
role_attribute_path = is_admin && 'Admin' || 'Viewer'
role_attribute_strict = true
allow_assign_grafana_admin = false
tls_skip_verify_insecure = false
tls_client_cert =
tls_client_key =
tls_client_ca =
use_pkce = true

PKCE

IETF’s RFC 7636 introduces “proof key for code exchange” (PKCE) which provides additional protection against some forms of authorization code interception attacks. PKCE will be required in OAuth 2.1.

You can disable PKCE in Grafana by setting use_pkce to false in the[auth.gitlab] section.

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use_pkce = true

Grafana always uses the SHA256 based S256 challenge method and a 128 bytes (base64url encoded) code verifier.

Configure automatic login

Set auto_login option to true to attempt login automatically, skipping the login screen. This setting is ignored if multiple auth providers are configured to use auto login.

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auto_login = true

Map roles

You can use GitLab OAuth to map roles. During mapping, Grafana checks for the presence of a role using the JMESPath specified via the role_attribute_path configuration option.

For the path lookup, Grafana uses JSON obtained from querying GitLab’s API /api/v4/user endpoint and a groups key containing all of the user’s teams. The result of evaluating the role_attribute_path JMESPath expression must be a valid Grafana role, for example, Viewer, Editor or Admin. For more information about roles and permissions in Grafana, refer to Roles and permissions.

On first login, if therole_attribute_path property does not return a role, then the user is assigned the role specified by the auto_assign_org_role option. You can disable this default role assignment by setting role_attribute_strict = true. It denies user access if no role or an invalid role is returned.

An example Query could look like the following:

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role_attribute_path = is_admin && 'Admin' || 'Viewer'

This allows every GitLab Admin to be an Admin in Grafana.

Map roles using groups

Groups can also be used to map roles. Group name (lowercased and unique) is used instead of display name for identifying groups

For instance, if you have a group with display name ‘Example-Group’ you can use the following snippet to ensure those members inherit the role ‘Editor’.

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role_attribute_path = contains(groups[*], 'example-group') && 'Editor' || 'Viewer'

Note: If a match is found in other fields, groups will be ignored.

Map server administrator privileges

Available in Grafana v9.2 and later versions.

If the application role received by Grafana is GrafanaAdmin, Grafana grants the user server administrator privileges.
This is useful if you want to grant server administrator privileges to a subset of users.
Grafana also assigns the user the Admin role of the default organization.

The setting allow_assign_grafana_admin under [auth.gitlab] must be set to true for this to work.
If the setting is set to false, the user is assigned the role of Admin of the default organization, but not server administrator privileges.

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allow_assign_grafana_admin = true

Example:

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role_attribute_path = is_admin && 'GrafanaAdmin' || 'Viewer'

Team Sync (Enterprise only)

Only available in Grafana Enterprise v6.4+

With Team Sync you can map your GitLab groups to teams in Grafana so that your users will automatically be added to the correct teams.

Your GitLab groups can be referenced in the same way as allowed_groups, like example or foo/bar.

Learn more about Team Sync

Skip organization role sync

To prevent the sync of organization roles from GitLab, set skip_org_role_sync to true. This is useful if you want to manage the organization roles for your users from within Grafana. This also impacts the allow_assign_grafana_admin setting by not syncing the Grafana admin role from GitLab.

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[auth.gitlab]
# ..
# prevents the sync of org roles from Github
skip_org_role_sync = true
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