Summary of Authentication Methods in Red Hat Ansible Tower

Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4.0 has added token authentication as a new method for authentication so I wanted to use this post to summarize the numerous enterprise authentication methods and the best use case for each. Ansible Tower is designed for organizations to centralize and control their automation with a visual dashboard for out-of-the box control while providing a REST API to integrate with your other tooling on a deeper level. We support a number of authentication methods to make it easy to embed Ansible Tower into existing tools and processes to help ensure the right people can access Ansible Tower resources. For this blog post I will go over four of Ansible Tower’s authentication methods: Session, Basic, OAuth2 Token, and Single Sign-on (SSO). For each method I will provide some quick examples and links to the relevant supporting documentation, so you can easily integrate Ansible Tower into your environment.

1. Session Authentication

Session authentication is what’s used when logging in directly to Ansible Tower’s API or UI. It is used when a user wants to remain logged in for a prolonged period of time, not just for that HTTP request, i.e. when browsing the UI or Continue reading