Principle:OpenHands OpenHands Auth Setup
| Knowledge Sources | |
|---|---|
| Domains | Server_Architecture, SaaS_Infrastructure |
| Last Updated | 2026-02-11 21:00 GMT |
Overview
Configuring JWT-based authentication and server feature flags for a SaaS application centralizes security settings, provider credentials, and operational parameters into a single configuration object.
Description
The Auth Setup principle defines how a SaaS server establishes its authentication and authorization infrastructure during initialization. This encompasses JWT secret management for token signing and verification, GitHub App credentials for OAuth integration, feature flag configuration for enabling or disabling server capabilities, and webhook signature verification for secure external communication. A centralized configuration object aggregates these settings from environment variables and validates them at startup, failing fast if required credentials are missing. The configuration also controls which integration providers are active, what billing features are enabled, and how the server identifies itself to external services.
Usage
Apply this principle during server bootstrap when the application must establish its identity, configure authentication mechanisms, and validate that all required credentials are present before accepting traffic. This is critical in multi-tenant SaaS environments where misconfigured authentication could expose user data across tenants or allow unauthorized access to administrative functions.
Theoretical Basis
The configuration object pattern centralizes security settings, feature flags, and provider credentials into a single authoritative source. This approach provides several guarantees: (1) all configuration is validated at startup rather than at first use, enabling fail-fast behavior; (2) configuration values are immutable after initialization, preventing runtime tampering; (3) dependent components receive their configuration through dependency injection rather than direct environment variable access, improving testability. JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication provides stateless session management where the server signs tokens containing user identity claims and verifies them on subsequent requests without database lookups. The combination of centralized configuration and JWT-based auth creates a security model that scales horizontally because any server instance with the same configuration can validate any user token.