OpenID Connect Identity Provider
Overview
Adding a Login button for a third-party OpenID Connect provider to FusionAuth is simple. This guide will walk you through the steps necessary to enable an OpenID Connect login provider.
Each request made to an OpenID Connect identity provider will utilize the PKCE extension. This extension is backwards compatible for identity providers that do not require or support PKCE. See the section below on PKCe for additional detail.
We also provide specific examples for configuring OpenID connect with some providers whose implementation requires unique configuration. If you’d like us to provide additional examples, please open a request on GitHub.
Once you have completed this configuration you will be able to enable the OpenID Connect login button for one or more FusionAuth Applications. Below is an example login page with an OpenID Connect Identity Provider enabled for PiedPiper.

Create an OpenID Connect Identity Provider
To create an Identity Provider navigate to Add provider
and select OpenID Connect
from the dialog.
This will take you to the Add OpenID Connect
panel, and you’ll fill out the required fields. If you do not know the Client Id and Client secret for this provider you will need to contact the owner of the OpenID Connect provider.
If your OpenID Connect provider has implemented a well-known configuration endpoint, FusionAuth will be able to discover the necessary endpoints when you provide the URL to the provider in the Issuer
field. For example, if you enter https://login.piedpiper.com
in the Issuer
field, FusionAuth will attempt to make a request to https://login.piedpiper.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
to retrieve additional configuration. Alternatively you may provide fully qualified URLs for each of the required endpoints, to do this, toggle off the Discover endpoints
switch and you will be shown three required fields.
To enable this identity provider for an application, find your application name in the Applications
configuration section at the bottom of this panel. You will always see the FusionAuth
application, this application represents the FusionAuth user interface. If you wish to be able to log into FusionAuth with this provider you may enable this application.
In the following screenshot you will see that we have enabled this login provider for the Pied Piper
application and enabled Create registration
. Enabling create registration means that a user does not need to be manually registered for the application prior to using this login provider.
For example, when a new user attempts to log into Pied Piper
using this identity provider, if their user does not exist in FusionAuth it will be created dynamically, and if the Create registration
toggle has been enabled, the user will also be registered for Pied Piper
and assigned any default roles assigned by the application.
If you do not wish to automatically provision a user for this Application when logging in with PiedPiper, leave Create registration
off and you will need to manually register a user for this application before they may complete login with this provider.
That’s it, now the Login with PiedPiper
button will show up on the login page.

Form Fields
- Id Optional
-
An optional UUID. When this value is omitted a unique Id will be generated automatically.
- Name Required
-
A unique name to identity the identity provider. This name is for display purposes only and it can be modified later if desired.
- Client Id Required
-
The client Id that will be used during the authentication workflow with this provider. This value will have been provided to you by the owner of the identity provider.
- Client authentication method Optional Available since 1.15.3
-
The client authentication method to use with the OpenID Connect identity provider.
See the OIDC spec concerning Client Authentication for more information.
- Client secret Optional
-
The client secret that will be used during the authentication workflow with this provider. This value will have been provided to you by the owner of the identity provider. This value is required when Client authentication method is not
HTTP basic authentication (client_secret_basic)
orRequest body (client_secret_post)
. - Redirect URL Read-only Available since 1.6.0
-
This is the redirect URI you will need to provide to your identity provider.
- Discover endpoints
-
When enabled FusionAuth will attempt to discover the endpoint configuration using the Issuer URL.
For example, if
https://login.piedpiper.com
is specified as the issuer, the well-known OpenID Connect URLhttps://piedpiper.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
will be queried to discover the well-known endpoints.When disabled, you may manually enter the required endpoints, this option is helpful if your OpenID Connect provider does not implement the well-known discovery endpoint.
- Issuer Required
-
This is the public URL of the identity provider.
When Discover endpoints is enabled, this field will be required.
- Authorization endpoint Required
-
The public URL of the OpenID Connect authorization endpoint.
When Discover endpoints is disabled, this field will be required.
- Token endpoint Required
-
The public URL of the OpenID Connect token endpoint.
When Discover endpoints is disabled, this field will be required.
- Userinfo endpoint Required
-
The public URL of the OpenID Connect userinfo endpoint.
When Discover endpoints is disabled, this field will be required.
- Reconcile lambda Optional
-
A lambda may be utilized to map custom claims returned from the OpenID Connect provider.
To configure a lambda, navigate to
. - Button text Required
-
The text to be displayed in the button on the login form. This value is defaulted to
Login with OpenID Connect
but it may be modified to your preference. - Button image Optional
-
The image to be displayed in the button on the login form. When this value is omitted a default OpenID Connect icon will be displayed on the login button.
- Scope Optional
-
This optional field defines the scope you’re requesting from the user during login. This is an optional field, but it may be required depending upon the OpenID Connect provider you’re using. At a minimum, the provider must return an email address from the Userinfo endpoint.
- Managed domains Optional
-
You may optionally scope this identity provider to one or more managed domains. For example, if you were to use an OpenID Connect identity provider for your employees, you may add your company domain
piedpiper.com
to this field.Adding one or more managed domains for this configuration will cause this provider not to be displayed as a button on your login page. Instead of a button the login form will first ask the user for their email address. If the user’s email address matches one of the configured domains the user will then be redirected to this login provider to complete authentication. If the user’s email address does not match one of the configured domains, the user will be prompted for a password and they will be authenticated using FusionAuth.
These configured domains will be used by the Lookup API.
Proof Key for Code Exchange
Available since 1.21.0
Proof Key for Code Exchange, more commonly referred to as PKCE (pronounced pixy) is an extension to the Authorization Code grant. This extension is intended to help secure the code exchange workflow utilized by this OpenID Connect configuration.
This extension is used by default on all OpenID Connect IdP configurations, and it cannot be disabled. The use of this extension is backwards compatible with identity providers that either do not require or support PKCE.
FusionAuth will pass along the required PKCE request parameters to the OpenID Connect identity provider and if the provider supports PKCE, the extension will be utilized, and if it is not supported it will be ignored.
Troubleshooting
The first steps to troubleshooting any OIDC connection are:
-
Double check all your configuration, including making sure that there are no errant spaces.
-
Turn on debugging and view the event log entries during a typical login flow.
User info as JWT
The OIDC specification allows a client to request the userinfo
response in various formats:
-
JSON
-
Signed JWT
-
Encrypted/nested JWT
FusionAuth supports the JSON format only. If you are trying to set up an OIDC integration and see an error message like:
Request to the [https://example.com/userinfo] endpoint failed. Status code [200].
Exception encountered.com.inversoft.rest.JSONException : Message: Failed to parse the HTTP response as JSON. Actual HTTP response body:
eyJoa...
This means that the OIDC endpoint is sending back the userinfo
data as a JWT. Please review your client registration with the OIDC endpoint administrators to ensure userinfo
data is sent back as JSON.
Unable to login
A common pattern is to set up OIDC as the login method for the FusionAuth application. This lets you keep all your users in the OIDC system, and have FusionAuth delegate auth decisions to it. However, if your Identity Provider isn’t configured correctly, you can end up in a dead end, unable to log in. This might happen if you:
-
Set up OIDC as the authentication method for your FusionAuth admin application.
-
Set the Managed domains to your domain. For example,
example.com
. -
Don’t have any users with a domain that is different than
example.com
. -
Accidentally misconfigure OIDC and break authentication.
-
Log out of the FusionAuth admin application.
You won’t be able to log in to the FusionAuth admin application to correct the misconfiguration. You’ve locked down the FusionAuth admin application so that only valid logins can access it, but because of the misconfiguration, there is no account with a valid OIDC login.

This is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. Your options depend on when you discover the issue. If you are beginning your OIDC configuration, you can avoid this scenario. Follow these steps:
-
Don’t set any value of Managed domains before you have tested the OIDC configuration.
-
Test authentication in a different or incognito browser window, ensuring that an admin user account is always accessible to modify configuration.
-
Add an admin user account with a domain not in the Managed domains setting. Ensure this user is registered with the FusionAuth admin application and has the
admin
role. -
Set up an API key. Navigate to
to do so and make sure it has privileges to create users and registrations. This will open up options in the future to reset settings without using the administrative user interface.
If you are currently locked out of your FusionAuth application, you have fewer options:
-
If you have a known username and password that are not delegated to OIDC (perhaps the initial account created when you set up FusionAuth) proceed to the FusionAuth admin login page. Append
&showPasswordField=true
to the end of the login URL. This will force the UI to show the password field. -
If you have an API key with appropriate privileges, you can modify the configuration without using the administrative user interface. Add an admin user with a different email domain and sign into the admin interface to correct your OIDC configuration. Here’s how you might do so (
3c219e58-ed0e-4b18-ad48-f4f92793ae32
is the FusionAuth application Id):
curl -XPOST -H "Authorization: $API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"user": {"email": "user@differentdomain.com","password":"password"}, "registration": {"applicationId" : "3c219e58-ed0e-4b18-ad48-f4f92793ae32","roles":["admin"]}}' \
https://local.fusionauth.io/api/user/registration
If you have neither an API key nor a known user, you can restore from a database backup, modify the database directly if you have access, or re-install FusionAuth.