JWT Auth

Use a customized login flow to authenticate users

If you don’t have a dashboard, or if you want to keep your dashboard and docs completely separate, you can use your own login flow to send user info to your docs via a JWT in the URL.

Implementation

1

Generate a private key

Go to your Mintlify dashboard settings and generate a private key. Store this key somewhere secure where it can be accessed by your backend.

2

Create a login flow

Create a login flow that does the following:

• Authenticate the user
• Create a JWT containing the authenticated user’s info in the UserInfo format
• Sign the JWT with the secret, using the ES256 algorithm
• Create a redirect URL back to your docs, including the JWT as the hash

3

Configure your User Auth settings

Return to your Mintlify dashboard settings and add the login URL to your User Auth settings.

Example

I want to set up authentication for my docs hosted at docs.foo.com. I want my docs to be completely separate from my dashboard (or I don’t have a dashboard at all).

To set up authentication with Mintlify, I go to my Mintlify dashboard and generate a JWT secret. I create a web URL https://foo.com/docs-login that initiates a login flow for my users. At the end of this login flow, once I have verified the identity of the user, I create a JWT containing the user’s custom data according to Mintlify’s specification. I use a JWT library to sign this JWT with my Mintlify secret, create a redirect URL of the form https://docs.foo.com#{SIGNED_JWT}, and redirect the user.

I then go to the Mintlify dashboard settings and enter https://foo.com/docs-login for the Login URL field.

Here’s what the code might look like:

import * as jose from 'jose';
import { Request, Response } from 'express';

const TWO_WEEKS_IN_MS = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 7 * 2;

const signingKey = await jose.importPKCS8(process.env.MINTLIFY_PRIVATE_KEY, 'ES256');

export async function handleRequest(req: Request, res: Response) {
  const userInfo = {
    expiresAt: Math.floor((Date.now() + TWO_WEEKS_IN_MS) / 1000),
    groups: res.locals.user.groups,
    content: {
      firstName: res.locals.user.firstName,
      lastName: res.locals.user.lastName,
    },
  };

  const jwt = await new jose.SignJWT(userInfo)
    .setProtectedHeader({ alg: 'ES256' })
    .setExpirationTime('10 s')
    .sign(signingKey);

  return res.redirect(`https://docs.foo.com#${jwt}`);
}

Preserving Anchors

Post-login, if you’d like to redirect to a specific anchor on the page, you can use the following format to create the redirect URL: https://docs.foo.com/page#jwt={SIGNED_JWT}&anchor={ANCHOR}.

Example:

• Original: https://docs.foo.com/quickstart#step-one
• Redirect: https://docs.foo.com/quickstart#jwt={SIGNED_JWT}&anchor=step-one