Designer SSO Login

Greentic Designer supports single sign-on (SSO) via OpenID Connect (OIDC). When SSO is enabled for a tenant, users click Sign in with SSO on the Designer login page and authenticate through their organisation’s identity provider — tenant-manager — without any admin session being involved. The Designer mints its own session from the result.

How the flow works

1. User opens the Designer login page and clicks Sign in with SSO.

2. Designer redirects to designer-admin (the OIDC broker), carrying a return_to parameter set to the Designer’s own origin.

3. designer-admin validates the return_to origin against its configured --sso-return-origins allowlist and issues an authorisation redirect to tenant-manager (the identity provider) using PKCE + ES256.

4. User authenticates in tenant-manager using their registered passkey or other credential.

5. tenant-manager redirects back to designer-admin with an authorisation code. designer-admin exchanges it for an ID token, extracts the user’s identity, and issues a short-lived handoff token.

6. designer-admin redirects back to the Designer at return_to?token=<handoff>.

7. Designer exchanges the handoff token for a session, signs the user in, and navigates to the workspace. No admin cookie is set or read at any point.

ملاحظة

SSO does not require or create an admin session. designer-admin acts purely as an OIDC broker for this flow; the Designer is the only party that mints a user session.

Prerequisites

Before SSO login will work for a tenant, three things must be in place.

1. OIDC issuer bound in designer-admin

The tenant record in designer-admin must have an oidc_issuer set. This is populated when the tenant is created or updated via the admin API or the tenant reconcile pass. If it is not set, the Sign in with SSO button does not appear on the Designer login page for that tenant.

2. Tenant-manager integration configured

designer-admin maintains an internal mapping from its own tenant IDs to the corresponding tenant-manager tenant IDs. This mapping is populated:

• automatically when a new tenant is pushed to designer-admin (create path), or
• on the next scheduled reconcile pass.

Until the mapping exists, SSO will fail with a generic error. For tenants created just moments ago, wait for the reconcile pass to complete before testing SSO.

3. User exists in tenant-manager

The signing-in user must already have an account in tenant-manager, including a completed passkey registration. Users are added via the tenant-manager invite flow — SSO login does not create new accounts on first sign-in.

Configuration

designer-admin

Flag	Environment variable	Description
--sso-return-origins <ORIGINS>	GREENTIC_ADMIN_SSO_RETURN_ORIGINS	Comma-separated list of Designer origins permitted as SSO return_to targets. Provide bare lowercase origins (scheme + host + optional port), e.g. https://designer.example.com. Multiple origins: https://designer.example.com,https://staging.designer.example.com. Under --dev, http://localhost, http://127.0.0.1, and http://[::1] on any port are allowed automatically and do not need to be listed here.

Example startup flags:

designer-admin \
  --sso-return-origins "https://designer.acme.com,https://designer-staging.acme.com"

Or via environment variable:

GREENTIC_ADMIN_SSO_RETURN_ORIGINS="https://designer.acme.com" designer-admin

Designer (optional)

Flag	Environment variable	Description
--public-url <URL>	GREENTIC_PUBLIC_URL	The Designer’s public-facing origin (bare: scheme + host + optional port). Set this when the Designer runs behind a reverse proxy that does not forward X-Forwarded-Proto, so that the Designer can construct the correct return_to value for the SSO redirect.

Example:

greentic-designer --public-url "https://designer.acme.com"

SSO-only tenants

If a tenant should not allow password-based login at all, you can disable local login in designer-admin for that tenant. When local login is disabled, the Designer login page hides the password form entirely and shows only the SSO option.

تنبيه

Disabling local login is a one-way action for a tenant’s users: they will only be able to sign in via SSO. Make sure tenant-manager is fully operational and all users have completed passkey registration before disabling local login.

Troubleshooting

”SSO sign-in failed” immediately after creating a tenant

The tenant-manager ID mapping has not yet been populated. Wait for the next reconcile pass and try again. The reconcile interval is configured in designer-admin; by default it runs on creation push. If you see this immediately after tenant creation, a brief wait (typically under a minute) resolves it.

The “Sign in with SSO” button is missing

Two possible causes:

1. oidc_issuer is not set for the tenant in designer-admin. Check the tenant record via the admin API and ensure oidc_issuer is populated.

2. The admin’s SSO URL was rejected by the login page’s safety check — it must be https://, or plain http:// only on localhost loopback during development. The browser console logs SSO login URL rejected; check admin configuration in this case.

Redirect rejected with invalid_return_to

The Designer origin is not in the --sso-return-origins allowlist on designer-admin. Add it to the list and restart (or hot-reload) designer-admin:

# Check current allowlist
designer-admin --help | grep sso-return-origins

# Fix: add the missing origin
GREENTIC_ADMIN_SSO_RETURN_ORIGINS="https://designer.example.com,https://new.designer.example.com" \
  designer-admin

SSO succeeds but the Designer shows an authentication error

The handoff token exchange may have timed out (tokens are short-lived) or the Designer’s clock is significantly skewed. Check that the system clocks on the Designer host and designer-admin host are synchronised (NTP). Also confirm that --public-url / GREENTIC_PUBLIC_URL is set correctly if the Designer is behind a proxy.

See also

• Admin Access — gtc admin API reference
• Multi-Tenancy — how tenants, environments, and isolation work in Greentic