File based

This page describes StackState version 4.3.

The StackState 4.3 version range is End of Life (EOL) and no longer supported. We encourage customers still running the 4.3 version range to upgrade to a more recent release.

Go to the documentation for the latest StackState release.

Overview

In case no external authentication provider can be used, you can use file based authentication. This will require every StackState user to be pre-configured in the configuration file. For every change made to a user in the configuration, StackState must be restarted.

StackState includes three default roles - Administrator, Power user and Guest. The permissions assigned to each default role and instructions on how to create other roles can be found in the RBAC documentation.

Set up file based authentication

Kubernetes

To configure file based authentication on Kubernetes, StackState users need to be added to the authentication.yaml file. For example:

# Three users, `admin`, `power-user` and `guest`
# with the three default roles Administrator, Power user and Guest

stackstate:
  authentication:
    file:
      logins:
        - username: admin
          passwordMd5: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99
          roles: [ stackstate-admin ]
        - username: guest
          passwordMd5: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99
          roles: [ stackstate-guest ]
        - username: power-user
          passwordMd5: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99
          roles: [ stackstate-power-user ]

Follow the steps below to configure users and apply changes:

In authentication.yaml - add users. The following configuration should be added for each user (see the example above):
- username - the username used to log into StackState.
- passwordMd5 - the password used to log into StackState. Passwords are stored as an MD5 hash and need to be provided as such, for example on a Linux or Mac command line the md5sum or md5 tools can be used.
- roles - the list of roles that the user is a member of. The default StackState roles are stackstate-admin, stackstate-power-user and stackstate-guest, for details on how to create other roles, see RBAC roles.
Store the file authentication.yaml together with the file values.yaml from the StackState installation instructions.

Run a Helm upgrade to apply the changes:

 helm upgrade \
   --install \
   --namespace stackstate \
   --values values.yaml \
   --values authentication.yaml \
 stackstate \
 stackstate/stackstate

Note:

The first run of the helm upgrade command will result in pods restarting, which may cause a short interruption of availability.
Include authentication.yaml on every helm upgrade run.
The authentication configuration is stored as a Kubernetes secret.

Linux

To configure file based authentication on Linux, StackState users need to be added to the application_stackstate.conf file. For example:

# Three users, `admin`, `power-user` and `guest`
# with the three default roles Administrator, Power user and Guest

authentication {
  authServer {
    authServerType = "stackstateAuthServer"

    stackstateAuthServer {
      # echo -n "password" | md5sum
      logins = [
        { username = "admin", password: "5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99", roles = ["stackstate-admin"] }
        { username = "power-user", password: "5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99", roles = ["stackstate-power-user"] }
        { username = "guest", password: "5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99", roles = ["stackstate-guest"] }
      ]
    }
  }
}