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Authentication basics

Hong Ooi

There are a number of ways to authenticate to the Microsoft Graph API with AzureGraph. This vignette goes through the most common scenarios.

Interactive authentication

This is the scenario where you’re using R interactively, such as in your local desktop or laptop, or in a hosted RStudio Server, Jupyter notebook or ssh session. The first time you authenticate with AzureGraph, you run create_graph_login():

# on first use
library(AzureGraph)
gr <- create_graph_login()

Notice that you don’t enter your username and password.

AzureGraph will attempt to detect which authentication flow to use, based on your session details. In most cases, it will bring up the Azure Active Directory (AAD) login page in your browser, which is where you enter your user credentials. This is also known as the “authorization code” flow.

There are some complications to be aware of:

All of the above arguments can be combined, eg this will authenticate using the device code flow, with an explicit tenant name, and a custom app ID:

gr <- create_graph_login(tenant="yourtenant", app="yourappid", auth_type="device_code")

If needed, you can also supply other arguments that will be passed to AzureAuth::get_azure_token().

Having created the login, in subsequent sessions you run get_graph_login(). This will load your previous authentication details, saving you from having to login again. If you specified the tenant in the create_graph_login() call, you’ll also need to specify it for get_graph_login(); the other arguments don’t have to be repeated.

gr <- get_graph_login()

# if you specified the tenant in create_graph_login
gr <- get_graph_login(tenant="yourtenant")

Non-interactive authentication

This is the scenario where you want to use AzureGraph as part of an automated script or unattended session, for example in a deployment pipeline. The appropriate authentication flow in this case is the client credentials flow.

For this scenario, you must have a custom app ID and client secret. On the client side, these are supplied in the app and password arguments; see later for creating the app registration on the server side. You must also specify your tenant as AAD won’t be able to detect it from a user’s credentials.

gr <- create_graph_login(tenant="yourtenant", app="yourccappid", password="client_secret")

In the non-interactive scenario, you don’t use get_graph_login(); instead, you simply call create_graph_login() as part of your script.

Creating a custom app registration

This part is meant mostly for Azure tenant administrators, or users who have the appropriate rights to create AAD app registrations.

You can create a new app registration using any of the usual methods. For example to create an app registration in the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com/), click on “Azure Active Directory” in the menu bar down the left, go to “App registrations” and click on “New registration”. Name the app something suitable, eg “AzureGraph custom app”.

Once the app registration has been created, note the app ID and, if applicable, the client secret. The latter can’t be viewed after app creation, so make sure you note its value now.

It’s also possible to authenticate with a client certificate (public key), but this is more complex and we won’t go into it here. For more details, see the Azure Active Directory documentation and the AzureAuth intro vignette.

Set the app permissions

For your app to be useful, you must give it the appropriate permisssions for the Microsoft Graph API. You can set this by going to the “API permissions” pane for your app registration, then clicking on “Add a permission”. Choose the Microsoft Graph API, and then enable the permissions that you need.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.