Skip to main content

Configuring for SAML Authentication

Warning

Chef Manage has reached End of Life (EOL) as of February 2026 and is no longer under active development or supported. Migrate to Chef 360 Platform as a replacement. Contact your Chef account representative for information about upgrading your system.

This document is no longer maintained.

Chef Manage can support logging in users using SAML authentication. In order to do so, there must be a Chef Automate Server that’s configured to act as a SAML Identity Provider (IdP). When the Chef Automate Server is configured to do so, it will provide an OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol end-point that Chef Manage can use to initiate authentication.

Configuring Chef Manage

To configure the Chef Infra Server management console, first add the following code to /etc/chef-manage/manage.rb:

saml.enabled true
saml.issuer_url '<AUTOMATE OIDC ENDPOINT>'

Second, store your OIDC client credentials with using the Secrets Management commands:

chef-server-ctl set-secret saml client_id '<CLIENT ID>'
chef-server-ctl set-secret saml client_secret '<CLIENT SECRET>'

The issuer_url property should be set to something like 'https://<yourChefAutomateDomain>/api/v0'. Also, the client_id must be known to the Chef Automate server. For development purposes only, you may also need to turn off the TLS verification for the OIDC client by adding

saml.verify_tls false

to your Chef Manage configuration.

Finally, run chef-manage-ctl reconfigure to apply these settings.

Warning

You can’t have both LDAP and SAML authentication enabled at the same time. If you do, the reconfigure will fail with an appropriate error message.
Edit this page on GitHub

Thank you for your feedback!

×