Configure JWT authentication

Configure JWT authentication

You can configure Grafana to accept a JWT token provided in the HTTP header. The token is verified using any of the following:

PEM-encoded key file
JSON Web Key Set (JWKS) in a local file
JWKS provided by the configured JWKS endpoint

This method of authentication is useful for integrating with other systems that use JWKS but can’t directly integrate with Grafana or if you want to use pass-through authentication in an app embedding Grafana.

Enable JWT

To use JWT authentication:

Enable JWT in the main config file.
Specify the header name that contains a token.

[auth.jwt]
# By default, auth.jwt is disabled.
enabled = true
# HTTP header to look into to get a JWT token.
header_name = X-JWT-Assertion

To identify the user, some of the claims needs to be selected as a login info. You could specify a claim that contains either a username or an email of the Grafana user.

Typically, the subject claim called "sub" would be used as a login but it might also be set to some application specific claim.

# [auth.jwt]
# ...
# Specify a claim to use as a username to sign in.
username_claim = sub
# Specify a claim to use as an email to sign in.
email_claim = sub
# auto-create users if they are not already matched
# auto_sign_up = true

If auto_sign_up is enabled, then the sub claim is used as the “external Auth ID”. The name claim is used as the user’s full name if it is present.

Iframe Embedding

If you want to embed Grafana in an iframe while maintaning user identity and role checks, you can use JWT authentication to authenticate the iframe.

Note: for scenarios where verifying viewer identity is not required, public dashboards embedding should be used.

In this scenario, you will need to configure Grafana to accept a JWT provided in the HTTP header and a reverse proxy should rewrite requests to the Grafana instance to include the JWT in the request’s headers.

Note: for embedding to work allow_embedding must be enabled in the security section.

In a scenario where it is not possible to rewrite the request headers you can use URL login instead.

url_login allows grafana to search for a JWT in the URL query parameter auth_token and use it as the authentication token.

Warning: this can lead to JWTs being exposed in logs and possible session hijacking if the server is not using HTTP over TLS.

# [auth.jwt]
# ...
url_login = true # enable JWT authentication in the URL

An example of an URL for accessing grafana with JWT URL authentication is:

http://env.grafana.local/d/RciOKLR4z/board-identifier?orgId=1&kiosk&auth_token=eyJhbxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A sample repository using this authentication method is available at grafana-iframe-oauth-sample.

Signature verification

JSON web token integrity needs to be verified so cryptographic signature is used for this purpose. So we expect that every token must be signed with some known cryptographic key.

You have a variety of options on how to specify where the keys are located.

Verify token using a JSON Web Key Set loaded from https endpoint

For more information on JWKS endpoints, refer to Auth0 docs.

# [auth.jwt]
# ...
jwk_set_url = https://your-auth-provider.example.com/.well-known/jwks.json
# Cache TTL for data loaded from http endpoint.
cache_ttl = 60m

Verify token using a JSON Web Key Set loaded from JSON file

Key set in the same format as in JWKS endpoint but located on disk.

jwk_set_file = /path/to/jwks.json

Verify token using a single key loaded from PEM-encoded file

PEM-encoded key file in PKIX, PKCS #1, PKCS #8 or SEC 1 format.

key_file = /path/to/key.pem

Validate claims

By default, only "exp", "nbf" and "iat" claims are validated.

You might also want to validate that other claims are really what you expect them to be.

# This can be seen as a required "subset" of a JWT Claims Set.
expect_claims = {"iss": "https://your-token-issuer", "your-custom-claim": "foo"}

Configure JWT Authentication