osso-react VS saml-rails

Osso also offers a React library that provides components like an form as well as lower level hooks for interacting with your Osso instance. Rather than you persisting data about which of your customers use SAML for auth, you can use the Osso React library to talk directly to Osso in order to build out your login form. Of course if you're not already using React on your front end it won't make a ton of sense to take this approach, but the Osso React source code should help you understand how you can implement such a form yourself.

Frankly we're using existing open source to handle this - we use ruby-saml which is maintained by OneLogin for the SAML parsing, but we also wrote a little ts parser for federated metadata files - https://github.com/enterprise-oss/osso-react/blob/main/src/u...

We’ll use the same Rails 6 application for each step - the source code is available here. The main branch adds Devise with a User model to a brand new Rails app using Postgres as the database. The application doesn’t do anything - there is an index route and a logged in route that will tell you the email for the current user. This guide assumes proficiency with Rails, so it will skip some details. We’ll also use some intentionally naive approaches to demonstrate common challenges of SAML SSO.

I recently dug into execution traces of a saml-rails example app, looking for "points of interest" in the code. Here are five interesting things that I learned about SAML and how to integrate SAML into a realistic application.