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I am designing my first dev tool with the Azure SDK (JavaScript), and I am having a difficult time understanding how to authenticate users in production so the dev tool can access the user's Azure account. The tool is going to retrieve metrics from all of the user's Azure Functions in their tenant to display React component graphs based on those metrics over time. The app will be run locally with an npm run command.

My entry point for using Azure Identity in my app was this blog post (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sdk/authentication-and-the-azure-sdk/). I like the way the DefaultAzureCredential is working in development, using the tenant for whichever developer is running it by using the AzureCliCredential. I want a similar functionality for production, but for the browser instead of Azure Cli. In other words, if a user is already logged in to Azure Portal, it will get a credential for their tenant. How do I go about this?

One of the things I tried was opting into the Interactive Browser of the DefaultAzureCredential as described in that blog post. But even though, I could see the browser method in the src (https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-js/blob/main/sdk/identity/identity/src/credentials/defaultAzureCredential.browser.ts), I couldn't figure how to opt into this when using the actual SDK. I couldn't find that method in the npm package in Azure Identity, and the documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/@azure/identity/defaultazurecredentialoptions?view=azure-node-latest) didn't help me either. If this is the correct option for my use case, I would like to understand how to opt into it and use it.

Another thing I tried was implementing the InteractiveBrowserCredential. As long as I pass in a redirectUri with a port not already being used by my app, it did open another tab to tell me to login to the Azure Portal if I am not already logged in. This is exactly the user experience I would want in my app. However, after logging in the credential didn't actually do anything. The credential returned actually has a client Id equal to the application Id (04b07795-8ddb-461a-bbee-02f9e1bf7b46) of Azure CLI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/active-directory/verify-first-party-apps-sign-in) for some reason. This led me to look into the Interactive Browser Credential and find out that it is using the Authorization Code Flow (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/javascript/api/@azure/identity/interactivebrowsercredential?view=azure-node-latest). This flow doesn't seem right for my use case, since I have to register my app. I am not trying to grant users access to my app, but access to their own Azure account. Is InteractiveBrowserCredential what I should be using?

Next, I looked into all of the different authentication flows. None of them seem quite right for my use case though. The closest one I found was the client credentials flow (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth2-client-creds-grant-flow) since I am authenticating the user to their own Azure account and not my app. However, even this one doesn't seem quite right because when I looked up how to implement that flow with Azure Identity (https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-js/blob/main/documentation/using-azure-identity.md#clientsecretcredential-and-clientcertificatecredential) I found out that I have to pass in the tenant Id. But the app won't know the user's tenant Id of the user before they log in. Which flow is right for this use case?

It seems like there is a gap in my understanding. How can I use the Azure SDK to implement an authentication flow that authenticates the user to their own Azure tenant (not authenticates them to my app) through the browser?

Alma Eyre
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Thank you ShwetaMathur for answering this question in Q & A. Posting the same here to help Stack Overflow community members.

To access your application by Azure AD users, your application should also need to register in Azure AD.

Once your application is register, you can acquire the access token based on different OAuth flows which is needed to call various resources(Users in your case) or protected API based on your scenario.

Azure Identity TokenCredential provide various flows to obtain an access token based on different scenarios.

InteractiveBrowserCredential is one way to launches the system default browser to interactively authenticate a user and obtain an access token.
Using access token, you can retrieve user’s info or access any other resource in Azure tenant. The InteractiveBrowserCredential uses Authorization Code Flow to authenticate users for browser based applications and to access resources further.

Client credential flow is OAuth flow commonly used for server-to-server interactions that usually run in the background, without immediate interaction with a user and help to acquire the token and call protected web APIs.

Complete reference

Madhuraj Vadde
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