scalar_auth.md

Scalar Authentication / Registration

When the "Manage Integrations" button is first clicked by a user, Element will try and register with the Integrations Manager to get a scalar_token that it then uses to authenticate all future requests with the manager.

$restUrl/register

This ends up mapping to /api/v1/scalar/register when Dimension is correctly set up for a Element instance.

Element will POST to this endpoint an OpenID object that looks similar to the following:

{
    "access_token": "ABCDEFGH",
    "token_type": "Bearer",
    "matrix_server_name": "matrix.org",
    "expires_in": 3600
}

expires_in is given in seconds.

With this information, we can hit the federation API on the matrix_server_name to get ourselves the Matrix User ID (MXID) of the user. This is a GET request to http://matrix.org/_matrix/federation/v1/openid/userinfo?access_token=ABCDEFGH. Be sure to replace the domain name and access token value.

The federation API responds with the following:

{
    "sub": "@turt2live:matrix.org"
}

At this point we can store whatever information we want. We do have to reply to the original web request, however. The following JSON is more than enough:

{
    "scalar_token": "some_generated_string"
}

Element will now use this token in future requests by hitting the "integrations_ui_url" with ?access_token=some_generated_string.