Build Cloudflare Access Sso

build-cloudflare-access-sso

Put a company-only login wall in front of a subdomain you already serve: Cloudflare Access for authorization, Google Workspace (or Email OTP) for identity, and an origin lockdown so nobody reaches the app by its IP address.

When to use

• An internal tool, dashboard, staging site, or agent UI is publicly reachable on app.example.com and must be restricted to one email domain.
• An app has no login of its own — or its login was disabled — and you need auth in front of it without touching application code.
• "Sign in with Google" must gate a hostname, and the Google OAuth client / consent screen has to be configured to match.
• Access is already configured but someone can still reach the app by hitting the origin IP with a Host: header.
• You are auditing an existing Access setup and need to prove it is not bypassable.

Do NOT use for:

• Private-network access where the origin is not publicly routable — that is a Cloudflare Tunnel + device-client design. This skill assumes a public origin behind a reverse proxy.
• SaaS SSO federation (Cloudflare as IdP into Slack/Datadog/etc.) — different app type, different setup.
• Gateway/DNS filtering, device posture, WARP rollout, DLP — Access controls who reaches an app; those control traffic.
• Adding auth inside your application (sessions, password hashing, OAuth in your own code).

First: three facts that shape every decision

1. Access only enforces on traffic that flows through Cloudflare. The Access application is a rule at the edge, not on your server. If the DNS record is DNS-only (grey cloud), or if a client resolves your origin IP directly, Access is not in the path at all — it still looks perfectly configured in the dashboard while enforcing nothing. Cloudflare's own docs say it plainly: if the app is already publicly routable a tunnel is not required, "however, you will then need to protect your origin IP using other methods."

2. Access is deny-by-default, and policies are standalone objects. An application with no Allow policy blocks everyone. Create the reusable policy first (POST /accounts/{account_id}/access/policies), then attach it to the app by id. Policies created through the app-scoped endpoint come back as reusable: false and are legacy — do not create new ones that way.

3. Every secret in this flow is shown exactly once. The Google OAuth client secret is not re-displayable after creation (Google stopped showing existing secrets), and Cloudflare returns service-token secrets once. Capture them into a secret store or an env var at the moment of creation, or plan to rotate.

The three load-bearing parts

All three are required. Removing any one silently reopens public access with no visible error.

The origin IP is not a secret. It leaks through TLS-certificate logs, *.sslip.io-style hostnames, historical DNS, mail headers, and scan databases. Treat "nobody knows the IP" as false.

Prerequisites

• A zone on Cloudflare (the domain's nameservers point at Cloudflare).

• Zero Trust onboarded on the account, which fixes the team domain https://<team-name>.cloudflareaccess.com. The name is chosen once and is globally unique — a taken name returns auth_domain_not_available.

• An API token, account-scoped (there are no zone-scoped Access permissions):

  Permission	Needed for
  Account → Access: Apps and Policies → Edit	Create the app and the reusable policy
  Account → Access: Organizations, Identity Providers, and Groups → Edit	Create the Google IdP (narrower: Access: Identity Providers Edit)
  Zone → DNS → Edit	Flip the record to proxied

  Labels drift between "Edit" and "Write" in the docs; confirm against the account's permission groups if a create call returns 403.

• Shell access to the reverse proxy or firewall in front of the origin.

export CF_API_TOKEN="$(cat ~/.secrets/cf_access_token)"   # never inline the literal
export CF_ACCOUNT_ID="…"                                  # from the dashboard URL
export CF_ZONE_ID="…"

Workflow

1. Establish the team domain

If Zero Trust has never been set up on the account, onboarding is dashboard-only: it asks for a team name and a plan (Free covers 50 seats but still asks for payment details without charging). Record <team-name> — the Google redirect URI in step 2 depends on it and cannot be guessed.

Agent has no browser? See references/dashboard-via-ego-browser.md for driving the console.

2. Create the Google OAuth client, then the Cloudflare IdP

Google Cloud Console is dashboard-only. The one value that must be exact:

https://<team-name>.cloudflareaccess.com/cdn-cgi/access/callback

Then register it with Cloudflare:

curl -sX POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$CF_ACCOUNT_ID/access/identity_providers" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CF_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"name\":\"Google\",\"type\":\"google\",
       \"config\":{\"client_id\":\"$GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID\",\"client_secret\":\"$GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET\"}}"

Read references/google-oauth-idp.md before doing this. It covers the consent-screen trap that costs the most debugging time: a project in Testing mode only lets listed test users complete Google login, and the failure surfaces as a Google error before Cloudflare is ever reached — so it looks nothing like an Access problem.

Also add Email one-time PIN as a second IdP. It is not subject to the Google test-user list and is the escape hatch when Google-side configuration breaks.

3. Create the reusable policy, then the application

Order matters — the policy is a standalone object and the app links it by id.

POLICY_ID=$(curl -sX POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$CF_ACCOUNT_ID/access/policies" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CF_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name":"Allow example.com email domain","decision":"allow",
       "include":[{"email_domain":{"domain":"example.com"}}]}' | jq -r '.result.id')

curl -sX POST "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$CF_ACCOUNT_ID/access/apps" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CF_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"name\":\"Internal Dashboard\",\"domain\":\"app.example.com\",\"type\":\"self_hosted\",
       \"session_duration\":\"24h\",\"auto_redirect_to_identity\":false,
       \"policies\":[{\"id\":\"$POLICY_ID\",\"precedence\":1}]}"

references/api-recipes.md has the full set: include/require/exclude selectors, multi-hostname apps, service tokens for CI, bypass-path carve-outs, and how to migrate a legacy reusable: false policy with make_reusable.

Field names on this API change between versions. Before scripting anything beyond the shapes above, read the current schema rather than trusting an example — including this one.

4. Put the hostname behind the proxy

curl -sX PATCH "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$CF_ZONE_ID/dns_records/$RECORD_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CF_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"proxied":true}'

If the origin terminates TLS with its own certificate (Let's Encrypt via Traefik/Caddy/nginx), the zone's SSL mode must be Full or Full (strict). Flexible causes a redirect loop.

5. Lock the origin

This is the step every comparable guide omits, and the reason a "protected" app is often still open. Verify the bypass exists before fixing it so you know the fix did something:

curl -skI --resolve app.example.com:443:<origin-ip> https://app.example.com/ | head -1
# HTTP/2 200 here means Access is bypassable right now

Then apply at least one of — ideally both — the IP allowlist and origin token validation, from references/origin-lockdown.md. It has ready configs for Traefik v3 (ipallowlist, note the v2 spelling changed), nginx, Caddy, and cloud firewalls, plus the JWT-validation pattern (CF-Access-Jwt-Assertion verified against the team JWKS), and the PaaS hazard where a control-plane redeploy regenerates router labels and silently detaches the middleware.

Never paste a static IP list. Fetch it:

curl -s https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/ips | jq -r '.result.ipv4_cidrs[], .result.ipv6_cidrs[]'

6. Verify — all four checks, or it is not done

Check 4 is the one people skip, and it is the only one that proves the policy works rather than the login page rendering. Run the full matrix in references/verification-matrix.md, which also covers other hostnames on the same proxy (regression check) and HTTP :80.

7. Write down what is not in git

The Access app, the policy, the IdP, and the DNS proxy flag live in Cloudflare's control plane. The origin allowlist may live in a PaaS database rather than your repo. Record, in the repo's AGENTS.md/README.md: the three parts, which one lives where, how to re-attach the origin middleware, and how a new employee gets added. Use names and locations, never values.

Credential hygiene (non-negotiable)

This workflow handles an OAuth client secret, an API token, and possibly service-token secrets.

• Read secrets from env vars or a secret manager. Never inline a literal into a command you run, a file you write, or a report you print.
• When writing examples or docs, show the reference ($GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET, ~/.secrets/cf_token) or the generation step (openssl rand -hex 32), never a value.
• Account IDs, zone IDs, application/policy/IdP UUIDs, team names, and origin IPs are not passwords, but they are targeting information — keep them out of anything public. Use example.com, app.example.com, <team-name>, <origin-ip>.
• Scope the API token to the three permissions above. Do not reuse a Global API Key.
• The Google client secret cannot be re-read after creation. If it is lost, add a new secret on the client and update the Cloudflare IdP — do not recreate the client, which would invalidate the redirect URI you already registered.
• Before committing anything produced here, grep the diff for sk-, GOCSPX-, Bearer , gho_/ghp_, and 32-hex account-id shapes.

Failure quick-reference

Recommended: install ego-browser

Two steps here are genuinely dashboard-only — Zero Trust onboarding/team-domain selection, and Google Cloud Console OAuth-client creation. An agent with a real browser can finish the job instead of handing you a checklist.

ego-browser (from ego lite) is a Chromium built for agents: it runs agent work in an isolated task space that reuses your existing login state, so it can drive the Cloudflare and Google consoles as you without taking over your browser windows, and it hands control back for the parts you must click yourself.

• Skill: citrolabs/ego-lite → skills/ego-browser/SKILL.md
• Install: run the skill's scripts/install.sh (macOS), finish onboarding once, then command -v ego-browser.

Read references/dashboard-via-ego-browser.md for the console flows, the credential rules that apply when a browser session is holding your real logins, and when to hand control back.

Reference routing

Guardrails

• Do not declare the subdomain protected until check 2 in step 6 returns 403. A login page proves nothing on its own.
• Do not create app-scoped (reusable: false) policies.
• Do not disable one of the three parts to "simplify" — each one alone is not a control.
• Do not paste a hardcoded Cloudflare IP list; fetch it and re-fetch it periodically.
• Do not publish a Google OAuth consent screen without checking what else lives in that GCP project — publishing is project-wide and can pull unrelated clients into verification.
• Do not print, log, or commit a secret value at any point in this workflow.