Admin Portal

Introduction

The Admin Portal provides an out-of-the-box UI for IT admins to configure SSO, SAML, and OpenID Connections. Designed to remove friction, custom walk-through documentation for each Identity Provider means that enterprise admins can onboard their orgs without high-touch support from your team. Easy to integrate and fully maintained and hosted by WorkOS, the Admin Portal makes the SSO setup process simple, fast, and secure.

What you’ll build

In this guide, we'll walk you through the full end-to-end integration of the Admin Portal into your application.

Sign in to your Developer Dashboard account to see code examples pre-filled with your API keys and resource IDs.

This guide will show you how to:

Before getting started

To get the most out of this guide, you’ll need:

• A Developer Dashboard account.

API Object Definitions

1. Install the WorkOS SDK of your choice

npm install @workos-inc/node

2. Set environment variables

As a best practice, your WorkOS API key should be kept secret and set as an environment variable on process start. The Project ID should also be set dynamically based on the release environment.

WORKOS_API_KEY='{secretKey}'
WORKOS_CLIENT_ID='{clientID}'

3. Create a new Organization

Each Admin Portal session is scoped to a specific Organization resource, meaning a session is only capable of managing a Connection that belongs to its associated Organization. Organizations may only have one Connection.

For every Enterprise in your application that would like access to the Admin Portal, you must create an Organization and maintain a reference to its ID.

Create an Organization when onboarding a new Enterprise.

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const express = require('express');
const WorkOS = require('@workos-inc/node');

const app = express();

const workos = new WorkOS(process.env.WORKOS_API_KEY);

app.post('/provision-enterprise', (_req, res) => {
  const organizationName =  // ... The name of the Enterprise to provision
  const organizationDomains =  // ... The list of domains the Enterprise uses

  const organization = await workos.portal.createOrganization({
    name: organizationName,
    domains: organizationDomains,
  });

  // You should persist `organization.id` since it will be needed
  // to generate a Portal Link.

  // Provision additional Enterprise-tier resources.
});

4. Redirect an IT admin to the Admin Portal

A Portal Link is your enterprise user’s gateway to accessing their Admin Portal. Each Portal Link is generated using an Organization resource ID. Only resources belonging to the specified Organization can be managed during a Portal Session.

For security reasons, Portal Links expire 5 minutes after they’re created, so we recommend redirecting users immediately (i.e. don’t email the user Portal Links.)

The endpoint that redirects a user to the Admin Portal should be guarded by auth in your application and only available to IT admins.

If you’re interested in custom-labeling the Admin Portal, please reach out to WorkOS support.

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const express = require('express');
const WorkOS = require('@workos-inc/node');

const app = express();

const workos = new WorkOS(process.env.WORKOS_API_KEY);

app.get('/admin-portal', (_req, res) => {
  const organizationID =  // ... The ID of the organization to start an Admin Portal session for

  const { link } = await workos.portal.generateLink({
    organization: organizationID,
    intent: GeneratePortalLinkIntent.SSO,
    returnUrl: "https://www.example.com" //optional
  });

  res.redirect(link);
});

An optional return_url parameter can be used to describe exactly where a user should be sent when they are finished in the Admin Portal. If one is not provided, the default redirect link configured in the Admin Portal Dashboard is used.

1. Build a webhook URL

Webhooks should use HTTPS and expect to receive POST requests with the following headers:

Below, we’ve provided a few different approaches for implementing a webhook endpoint, each with different use cases based on where you are in the development lifecyle and your application’s needs.

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const express = require('express')

const app = express();

app.use(express.json());

app.post('/webhook', (req, res) => {
  const sig = req.headers['workos-signature'];
  const { data, event } = req.body;

  // Verify the signature and process the event

  res.json(req.body);
});

2. Register the webhook

Set and save the webhook URL in the Developer Dashboard so WorkOS knows where to deliver events.

The Webhook Secret is used to verify webhook requests from WorkOS. Be sure to keep the value secure.

3. Receive events

We suggest handling events using two concurrent processes to avoid the possibility of unnecessary retry requests hitting your webhook handler.

Process A: Respond with HTTP 200 OK

On receiving an event, you should respond with an HTTP 200 OK. Otherwise, WorkOS will consider the event delivery a failure and retry up to 12 times, with exponential backoff over 3 days.

Process B: Process the request

Before processing the request payload, verify the request was sent by WorkOS and not an unknown party.

First, extract the timestamp and signature from the header. There are two values to parse from the WorkOS-Signature, delimited by a , character.

1. issued_timestamp: The epoch time at which the event was issued, prefixed by t=.
2. signature_hash: The HMAC SHA256 hashed signature for the request, prefixed by v1=.

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const signature = req.headers['workos-signature']
const [t, v1]= signature.split(',')
const { 1: issued_timestamp } = t.split('=')
const { 1: signature_hash } = v1.split('=')

To avoid replay attacks, we suggest validating that the issued_timestamp does not differ too much from the current time.

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Construct the expected signature. The expected signature is computed from the concatenation of:

1. issued_timestamp
2. The . character
3. The request’s body as a utf-8 decoded string

Hash the string using HMAC SHA256, using the Webhook Secret as the key. The expected signature will be the hex digest of the hash.

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const signature = req.headers['workos-signature']
const [t, v1]= signature.split(',')
const { 1: timestamp } = t.split('=')
const { 1: signatureHash } = v1.split('=')

const signed_payload = `${timestamp}.${JSON.stringify(req.body)}`

const expected_signature = crypto.createHmac('sha256', process.env.WEBHOOK_SECRET)
  .update(signed_payload)
  .digest()

Compare signatures to make sure the webhook request is valid.

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Once you’ve determined the event request is validly signed, it’s safe to use the event, i.e. the request body, in your application’s business logic.