In the following help article, we're going to show you an overview of how the SSO process with JWT tokens works. If you'd like to learn more about JWT, you can do so here.

The SSO with JWT for HelpCenter.io allows you to easily authenticate and manage your help center users directly from your system. You can have admins, editors, and viewers exactly as you do when you are directly inviting users to your help center.

The JWT SSO works like this.

1. A non-authenticated user of yours tries to access your private help center/knowledge base created with HelpCenter.io.
2. The user is automatically redirected to a login URL on your website (e.g. https://myownwebsite.co/auth/helpcenter) where you are responsible for authenticating it (if it isn't already) and issuing a JWT token signed with a special shared secret between you and HelpCenter.io.
3. Your website redirects the user back to your help center at the /sso/jwt url with the generated jwt in the query params like this /sso/jwt?jwt={your-jwt-payload} where the payload will contain information about the user accessing your help center.
4. We are going to handle the payload decoding and authenticate your user so they have the appropriate access level.
5. That's it.

If you'd like to continue with enabling JWT SSO for your help center, check out how to do this here.