Authenticating an independent Single Page App

[Nabil Tharwat]

I hope someone can answer my question. We're currently running a Ruby on Rails Canvas using Instructure hosting (AFAIK). Management decided that we need a better app experience overall and so are moving towards a single page application. I looked through the docs but can't find anything on the login flow. 

I found OAuth docs but that's for authenticating apps on the user's behalf. Is there a way to authenticate normally? [Email & password -> send request -> get access & refresh tokens -> interact with API)

The SPA we're building will be on a different domain and will only ever interact with Canvas through the API. 

[Nico López]

Hi Nabil,

as far as I know if you wanna use Canvas authentication from a third party app, you should use developer keys https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-add-a-developer-key-for-an-account/ta-p/259

Another approach could be to have an external authentication service supported by Canvas. We've been using CAS (open source) for a while without issues, but our use case was single sign on.