How do you authencate to Azure App Services locally?

Question

There are alot of tutorials on how to configure the Authentication properties of a given Azure App Service instance:

Api Apps

Expanding App Service Authentication/Authorization

There are guides for configuring the Azure Server-Side properties for:

AAD

FaceBook

Twitter

Google

Microsoft Account

I believe these all are setting properties on the server-side gateways that sit in front of our Azure App Service components. This approach is nice, because you can initiate a login flow simply by directing your user's browser to ~/.auth/login/XYZ.

However, I can't figure out how I'm supposed to Authenticate against any of these at DEVELOPMENT time, running MVC apps and API Apps locally on my PC via localhost. I don't have a gateway running locally. There isn't an endpoint listening to localhost/.auth/login/XYZ.

So, what's the story? How do you authenticate there? Specifically, how do you develop in such a way that whatever you're going to need to do locally can be Published to your Web and Api Apps and have the auth experience work within the eco-system of the App Service in Azure?

Answer 1

According to this, the only way to do this is to write some dev-environment-only code to fake IPrincipals with claims equivalent to those provided by the Azure environment in production.

• Create an appSetting value in web.config that identifies whether the app is in local development mode such as:

  <add key="EnableLocalLogin" value="true" />

• Define this value in the azure portal application settings as false. This value will overwrite the one configured in the web.config.

• Create another login option that is only displayed when EnableLocalLogin appSetting is true.
• The "Login as local developer" button simply calls into an action method which:
  • Checks if the app is in local development mode.
  • If so, constructs an instance of the IPrincipal class with appropriate claims and calls the ASP.Net Identity systems to assign the identity to the current context.

Answer 2

You will need to set an alternate login host. You don't mention the SDK that you are using, but this is generally set by the following:

• client.alternateLoginHost = "https://blah.azurewebsites.net" (Cordova, .NET, Xamarin)
• client.setAlternateLoginHost(new URL("https://blah.azurewebsites.net")); (Android)

Sorry, I don't know iOS Development, but there is a loginHost field in that SDK as well.