The backend package for multi-provider external authentication in Plone, built on authlib and joserfc. See also the frontend package @plone-collective/volto-identity.

One canonical Plone user id maps to many external identities — GitHub, Google, another Plone site, any OpenID Connect provider, an emailed magic link — for the same human, without running a separate identity broker.

Features

• Identity linking. One account, many providers. The identity key is (provider, subject), and an identity already linked to somebody is never silently re-attached: a collision is a hard error, not a merge.
• Providers configured through the web. A control panel with a form generated from each driver's published schema, so a driver describes its own settings and the frontend composes rather than describes them. Client secrets are write-only through every API surface, GenericSetup export included.
• Five shipped drivers. github, google, oidc-generic, plone-identity (another Plone site running this package's server layer), and email for magic-link sign-in. Writing another means subclassing BaseDriver and registering a utility.
• Magic-link sign-in. Single-use signed tokens, at most fifteen minutes, rate limited per address and per IP, answering identically for known and unknown addresses.
• An audit log. Successes and refusals, per user or site-wide, bounded and purged on write. IP address and user agent are off by default, and the sink is a utility a deployment can replace.
• A documented event contract, which is what the audit log, the profile machinery and your own integrations all consume. Nothing reaches into anything else.
• Content-backed profiles and groups, with user properties, enumeration and group membership served entirely from a dedicated catalog. No content object is woken to answer them, and the test suite asserts that rather than claiming it.
• Federated group membership. Each provider's grants are recorded separately, so signing in through one never revokes what another gave you, and local grants survive both.
• Migrations from pas.plugins.authomatic and pas.plugins.oidc. Dry-run by default, idempotent, and they report what they would do before you let them do it.
• Core installs alone. uv add pas.plugins.identity with no extras is a tested configuration, enforced in CI by an import-linter contract rather than by discipline.

Layers and extras

The package installs as a core, with one optional layer beside it. [server] is that layer, and it brings a GenericSetup profile of its own. [sql] is an extra rather than a layer: it adds one audit sink and installs no profile.

Core never imports from the server layer, and CI fails the build if it starts to. Read the layers page for why the boundary is more than tidiness.

Not in scope

• Being an identity broker. Providers are configured on the site and mapped onto its own users; this package does not proxy one provider to another.
• Merging two existing accounts. A colliding identity is refused rather than reconciled, because a merge that guesses is worse than a refusal that explains.
• Storing credentials in a Dexterity field. Passwords stay in source_users, or in an annotation for a site that opts into ICredentialStorage. A field would be serialized, exported, indexed and versioned: four disclosure paths, each of which has to be remembered separately.
• SAML. Nothing here precludes a driver for it; none ships.

Documentation

Full documentation is published at collective.github.io/pas-plugins-identity, and its source lives in docs/ at the repository root.

The pages closest to this package:

• Start here: Install and Configure a provider.
• Concepts: identities, layers, users as content, secrets.
• Reference: shipped drivers, the event contract, the audit log, security guarantees.
• Writing a driver: Write a driver.

Installation

Requires Plone 6.2 and Python 3.12 or later.

Install pas.plugins.identity with uv.

uv add pas.plugins.identity

For the authorization server as well:

uv add "pas.plugins.identity[server]"

Create the Plone site.

make create-site

Then install pas.plugins.identity from the add-ons control panel, and configure a provider in Site Setup > Identity providers.

Contribute

• Issue tracker
• Source code

Prerequisites ✅

• An operating system that runs all the requirements mentioned.
• uv
• Make
• Git
• Docker (optional)

Installation 🔧

1. Clone this repository.

   git clone git@github.com:collective/pas-plugins-identity.git
   cd pas-plugins-identity/backend
   

2. Install this code base.

   make install
   

Tests

make test

Part of the suite drives a real OpenID Connect provider in a container and is marked docker. To run everything else:

uv run pytest -m "not docker"

License

The project is licensed under GPLv2.

Credits and acknowledgements 🙏

Generated using Cookieplone (2.0.0b3) and cookieplone-templates (91c8455) on 2026-08-20 18:32:15.036687. A special thanks to all contributors and supporters!