Enabling the alternate login option

Looker can authenticate users through one of several authentication server types, such as LDAP, SAML, or Google OAuth. Enabling any of these authentication methods will disable other authentication systems, such as email/password.

Admins can give users an alternate login option that uses their email address if the user or users have either an Admin role or login_special_email permissions.

Step 1: Enable alternate login on the Looker instance

First, the Looker instance must be configured to accept email credentials. To configure Looker to accept email credentials, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Authentication tab of the Admin panel, and select the currently enabled authentication type. Some examples include LDAP, SAML, and Google OAuth.
  2. Enable the Alternate login for admins and specified users switch in the Migration Options section.

Step 2: Grant the user permission to use alternate login

Only users with the Admin role or with the login_special_email permission may use alternate login. One way to grant the login_special_email permission to a non-admin user is to first create a new role containing that permission and then assign that role to the user, as follows:

  1. Navigate to the Roles page, located under the Users tab of the Admin panel.
  2. Click the New Permission Set button at the top of the page.
  3. Enter a name for the new permission set, for example, "Alternate Login".
  4. Check the box labeled login_special_email.
  5. Click the Save button at the bottom of the page.
  6. Click the New Role button at the top of the page.
  7. Enter a name for the new role, for example, "Alternate Login Role".
  8. Under the Permission Set section, select your new permission set from the list of permission sets.
  9. Under the Model Set section, select All.
  10. Under the Users section, select the user that should be granted the alternate login permission.
  11. Click the New Role button at the bottom of the page to save the new role.
  12. Click the Confirm button in the pop-up dialog box.

Step 3: Creating email credentials for the user

Now that the user has been enabled to use email credentials, those email credentials must be created. To create these credentials, a Looker admin can either use the Looker API to make a POST request or use the Looker API SDK in the programming language of the admin's choice.

Option 1: Making a POST request to the Looker API

Because of its manual nature, this is a better method to use when you have a limited number of users for whom you want to set up the alternate login option.

This example uses a curl command to make a POST request to the create_user_credentials_email API endpoint using a temporary access token:

  1. To generate the temporary token (ACCESS_TOKEN), follow the steps on the API Authentication documentation page in the Authentication without a SDK section.
  2. Using this temporary token in the authorization header, send a POST request to the Looker API using the user's user_id, and include their email in the body of the request. 
     curl -H "Authorization: token ACCESS_TOKEN" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X POST -d '{ "email": "example_name@example_email.com" }' https://<instance_name<.api.looker.com/api/3.1/users/{user_id}/credentials_email
  3. On the Users page of the Admin section, find the user account and click Edit.
  4. Click the Send reset link button. This will send an email to the email address you specified in your POST request.

To use the alternate login method, when the user logs in to Looker they will need to click the Alternate Login link and then enter their name and email address. They can still authenticate by using their SAML, LDAP, or OAuth credentials through the Authenticate button.

Option 2: Using the Looker API SDK

Rather than going through the manual steps of making requests directly to the Looker API, you can instead use a Looker-provided SDK to interact with the API in a programming language of your choice. After you have imported the Looker API SDK and established a client connection, follow these steps:

  1. Use the create_user_credentials_email(user_id, body) function, inserting the user_id and body as specified in the Looker API documentation. You can follow a similar example from this Looker Community post about automatically provisioning users with the Looker API.
  2. Once the user accounts have been updated using the SDK method, on the Users page of the Admin section, find the user account and click Edit.
  3. Click the Send reset link button. This will send an email to the email address you specified in your POST request.

To use the alternate login method, when the user logs in to Looker, they will need to click the Alternate Login link and then enter their name and email address. They can still authenticate by using their SAML, LDAP, or OAuth credentials through the Authenticate button.