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Gluu Server Community Edition (CE) 3.1.0 Documentation#

Introduction#

The Gluu Server is a free open source identity and access management (IAM) platform. The most common use case for the Gluu Server is Single Sign-On (SSO). Other common use cases include mobile authentication, API access management, two-factor authentication, customer identity and access management (CIAM) and identity federation.

The Gluu Server is a container distribution composed of software written by Gluu and incorporated from other open source projects. Gluu projects are frequently prefixed with our open source handle: ox (e.g. oxAuth, oxTrust). Any code in the Gluu Server that we wrote is MIT license, and is available on Github.

SaaS, custom, open source and commercial software can be made more secure by leveraging a central authentication and authorization service. Because there are so many different kinds of apps, there is no way to "top down" implement proprietary security mechanisms. This is why open standards are so important for IAM.

While there are many open protocols for IAM, Gluu focuses on just a few. Consolidation saves money, and one-off integrations should be avoided. Our goal was to support the most widely adopted older protocols, and the most promising new protocols.

The Gluu Server supports the following open web standards for authentication, authorization, federated identity, and identity management:

  • OAuth 2.0
  • SAML 2.0
  • OpenID Connect
  • User Managed Access (UMA)
  • System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM)
  • FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F)
  • Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

If this is your first exposure to the Gluu Server, welcome to the community! We want to see the ecosystem flourish, and ultimately make the Internet a safer, more privacy protected place. In order to do that, we believe we need to keep the Gluu Server free so all kinds of organizations can use, contribute and benefit from the software.

These docs are not perfect! Please help us make them so by submitting any improvements to our Documentation Github. If you're a Github pro, submit a pull request. If not, just open an issue on any typos, bugs, or improvements you'd lie to see. We need your help... even if you're not a coder, you can contribute!

Installation#

You can deploy the Gluu Server on the cloud provider of your choice using one of our easy-to-install packages for Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL and Debian. Follow our VM preparation guide to get started.

Identity Management#

The Gluu Server uses the open source OpenLDAP server as its internal directory server to store data generated by the service, such as user profiles, configuration data, tokens and credentials. The Gluu Server also supports the SCIM 2 APIs to simplify and standardize user provisioning and user management in the cloud. Learn more in the user management guide

SSO Integrations#

The Gluu Server supports a variety of SSO integration strategies for web and mobile applications. Learn more in our SSO integration guide.

Strong Authentication#

One of the biggest benefits of a central authentication system is the ability to enforce strong authentication for all your apps. The Gluu Server was designed to be very flexible in accommodating not only a range of authentication mechanisms, but also custom business logic for how authentication should be applied in practice. Learn more about how to configure the Gluu Server's out-of-the-box and custom strong authentication options in the authentication guide.

Support#

Gluu provies free and VIP support! Anyone can browse or register and post questions on the Gluu support portal. Tickets opened by the community are public, and we do our best to answer them in a timely manner.

Private support, guaranteed response times, and consultative support are available with a paid support contract. For more information, see our website.

License#

All of Gluu's open source software is published under an MIT License. The licenses for other components are listed below.

Component License
Shibboleth IDP Apache2
OpenLDAP OpenLDAP Public License
Asimba GNU APGL 3.0
UnboundID LDAP SDK UnboundID LDAP SDK Free Use License
Passport-JS MIT License
Jetty / Apache HTTPD Apache2