How to setup Single Sign-On (SSO) with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket

Note

This feature is only available on Read the Docs for Business.

This how-to guide will provide instructions on how to enable SSO with GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. If you want more information on this feature, please read Choosing a Single Sign-On (SSO) approach for your organization

Prerequisites

Organization permissions

To change your Organization’s settings, you need to be an owner of that organization.

You can validate your ownership of the Organization with these steps:

Navigate to the organization management page.
Look at the Owners section on the right menu.

If you’d like to modify this setting and are not an owner, you can ask an existing organization owner to take the actions listed.

User setup

Users in your organization must have their GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab account connected, otherwise they won’t have access to any project on Read the Docs after performing this change. You can read more about granting permissions on GitHub in their documentation.

Enabling SSO

You can enable this feature in your organization by:

Navigate to the authorization setting page.
Select GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket on the Provider dropdown.
Select Save

Warning

Once you enable this option, your existing Read the Docs teams will not be used. While testing you can enable SSO and then disable it without any data loss.

Grant access to read private documentation

By granting read permissions to a user in your git repository, you are giving the user access to read the documentation of the associated project on Read the Docs. By default, private git repositories are built as private documentation websites. Having read permissions to the git repository translates to having view permissions to a private documentation website.

Grant access to administer a project

By granting admin permission to a user in the git repository, you are giving the user access to read the documentation and to be an administrator of the associated project on Read the Docs.

Grant access to import a project

When SSO with a Git provider is enabled, only owners of the Read the Docs organization can import projects.

To be able to import a project, a user must have:

admin permissions in the associated Git repository.
Ownership rights to the Read the Docs organization

Revoke access to a project

If a user should not have access to a project, you can revoke access to the git repository, and this will be automatically reflected in Read the Docs.

The same process is followed in case you need to remove admin access, but still want that user to have access to read the documentation. Instead of revoking access completely, downgrade their permissions to read only.