Before interacting with a Galasa Ecosystem using the Galasa command line tool (galasactl), you must be authenticated with it. Galasa uses personal access tokens to authenticate users who want to interact with a Galasa Ecosystem provided by the GALASA_BOOTSTRAP environment variable or through the --bootstrap flag.

Personal access tokens are stored in the GALASA_TOKEN property in the galasactl.properties file in your Galasa home folder. The galasactl.properties file is created when you run the galasa local init command. Setting the GALASA_TOKEN property in this file with a valid token value allows the galasactl tool to access and communicate with an Ecosystem on behalf of the user.

If you have installed your Galasa Ecosystem by using the Galasa Ecosystem Helm chart that is provided with Galasa, you will have access to the Galasa Web UI. To get a value for the GALASA_TOKEN property, log into the Galasa Web UI and request a personal access token which can be copied into the GALASA_TOKEN property. The instructions on how to do this are displayed in a dialog box in the Galasa Web UI. You can choose to set the token as an environmental variable but the value would not persist across terminals, so is only valid for that session.

Authentication architecture

The following diagram shows the architecture for the authentication process:

When a user logs into the Galasa Web UI via their browser, the Web UI contacts the Galasa API server which in turn talks to a Dex server, providing it with the user ID. The Dex server talks to an identity provider, for example GitHub or LDAP, to authenticate that user. If the user is successfully authenticated, the provider returns an access token to the Dex server which sends that token to Galasa API server. The token is then sent to the Galasa Web UI where it is visible to the user. The user can then configure that token into the galasactl command line tool by updating the GALASA_TOKEN property in the galasactl.properties file. The user can then be authenticated each time the galasactl tool is used to log into a Galasa Ecosystem.

On a successful login, a bearer-token.json file is created in the Galasa home directory. This file contains a bearer token that galasactl uses to authenticate requests when communicating with a Galasa Ecosystem. If the bearer token expires, galasactl automatically attempts to re-authenticate with the Galasa Ecosystem using the properties in the galasactl.properties file within the Galasa home directory.

Logging in to a Galasa Ecosystem using the auth login command

You can log in to a Galasa Ecosystem explicitly by using the galasactl auth login command. You might want to do an explicit log in if you are running galasactl as part of a build pipeline, or if you just want to make sure you can log in.

Logging out of a Galasa Ecosystem using the auth logout command

To log out of a Galasa Ecosystem using galasactl, you can use the galasactl auth logout command. If you run a galasactl command that interacts with an Ecosystem while logged out, galasactl will attempt to automatically log in using the properties in your galasactl.properties file within your Galasa home directory.

Listing personal access tokens

You can retrieve a list of all active personal access tokens in the Ecosystem by using the galasactl auth tokens get command. This information is useful if you need to query active tokens with a view to revoking a particular token, for example, if a user moves to a new role, or loses a laptop with their access token on it.

The token ID, creation date, username, and description information is returned, as shown in the following example:

> galasactl auth tokens get 
tokenid         created(YYYY/MM/DD)  user                description
09823128318238  2024-02-03           m.smith@gmail.com   Ecosystem1 access 
87a6s2y8hqwd27  2024-05-04           s_jones@gmail.com   CLI access from VSCode

Total:2

The returned token list is sorted in creation date order, with the earliest creation date first. The description information matches the description that is provided by the user when creating a new access token from the Galasa Web UI.

Revoking personal access tokens

If a user moves to a new role, or loses a laptop with their personal access token on it, you can log into the Galasa Ecosystem and revoke their access token by using the galasactl auth tokens delete command. This ensures that the Ecosystem and systems-under-test remain secure.

You can retrieve a list of available personal access tokens that have been created, along with their token IDs, by running the galasactl auth tokens get command, as described in the previous section.

Run the following command to revoke a personal access token with the token ID myId:

galasactl auth tokens delete --tokenid myId

Note: The galasactl auth tokens delete command revokes personal access tokens that a user creates through the Galasa Web UI. When a user runs a CLI command that talks to the Ecosystem, the CLI uses the personal access token to get a JSON Web Token (JWT). A JWT is a separate, temporary token that identifies a user and is used in galasactl commands to talk to the API server. JWTs cannot be revoked, but they do expire, so a user can continue to run CLI commands after revoking their personal access token until their JWT expires. You can remove the JWT that is stored on a user's machine instead of having to wait for the JWT to expire, by running the galasactl auth logout command on that machine.

For more information about JWTs, see the Configuring Dex section in the Installing an Ecosystem using Helm documentation.