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Get access without a user

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Some apps call Microsoft Graph with their own identity and not on behalf of a user. In many cases, these apps are background services or daemons that run on a server without the presence of a signed-in user. An example of such an app might be an email archival service that wakes up and runs overnight. In some cases, apps that have a signed-in user present may also need to call Microsoft Graph under their own identity. For example, an app may need to use functionality that requires more elevated privileges in an organization than the signed-in user may have.

Apps that call Microsoft Graph with their own identity use the OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant flow to get access tokens from Azure AD. This article describes the basic steps to configure a service and use the OAuth client credentials grant flow to get an access token.

Authentication and authorization steps

Follow these basic steps to configure a service and get a token from the Microsoft identity platform endpoint. Your service can use the token to call Microsoft Graph under its own identity.

  1. Register your app.
  2. Configure permissions for Microsoft Graph on your app.
  3. Get administrator consent.
  4. Get an access token.
  5. Use the access token to call Microsoft Graph.

1. Register your app

To authenticate with the Microsoft identity platform endpoint, you must first register your app at the Azure app registration portal. You can use either a Microsoft account or a work or school account to register your app.

For a service that will call Microsoft Graph under its own identity, you need to register your app for the Web platform and copy the following values:

  • The application ID assigned by the Azure app registration portal.
  • A client (application) secret, either a password or a public/private key pair (certificate).
  • A redirect URL for your service to receive token responses.
  • A redirect URL for your service to receive admin consent responses if your app implements functionality to request administrator consent.

For steps on how to configure an app using the Azure app registration portal, see Register your app.

With the OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant flow, your app authenticates directly at the Microsoft identity platform /token endpoint using the application ID assigned by Azure AD and the client secret that you create using the portal.

2. Configure permissions for Microsoft Graph

Microsoft Graph exposes application permissions for apps that call Microsoft Graph under their own identity (Microsoft Graph also exposes delegated permissions for apps that call Microsoft Graph on behalf of a user).

You pre-configure the application permissions your app needs when you register your app. Application permissions always require administrator consent. An administrator can consent to these permissions either using the Azure portal when your app is installed in their organization, or you can provide a sign-up experience in your app through which administrators can consent to the permissions you configured. Once administrator consent is recorded by Azure AD, your app can request tokens without having to request consent again. For more detailed information about the permissions available with Microsoft Graph, see the Permissions reference

To configure application permissions for your app in the Azure app registrations portal, under an application's API permissions page, choose Add a permission, select Microsoft Graph, and then choose the permissions your app requires under Application permissions.

The following screenshot shows the Select Permissions dialog box for Microsoft Graph application permissions.

Select Permissions window for Microsoft Graph application permissions.

Important

Configure the least privileged set of permissions required by your app to improve its security. For more information, see Enhance security with the principle of least privilege.

You can rely on an administrator to grant the permissions your app needs at the Azure portal; however, often, a better option is to provide a sign-up experience for administrators by using the Microsoft identity platform /adminconsent endpoint.

Important

When you change the configured permissions, you must also repeat the admin consent process. Changes made in the app registration portal will not be reflected until consent has been reapplied by the tenant's administrator.

Request

// Line breaks are for legibility only.

GET https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant}/adminconsent
?client_id=6731de76-14a6-49ae-97bc-6eba6914391e
&state=12345
&redirect_uri=https://localhost/myapp/permissions
Parameter Condition Description
tenant Required The directory tenant that you want to request permission from. The value can be in GUID or a friendly name format. If you don't know which tenant the user belongs to and you want to let them sign in with any tenant, use common.
client_id Required The application ID that the Azure app registration portal assigned to your app.
redirect_uri Required The redirect URI where you want the response to be sent for your app to handle. It must match one of the redirect URIs that you registered in the portal. It must be URL encoded and it can have additional path segments.
state Recommended A value that is included in the request that also is returned in the token response. It can be a string of any content that you want. The state is used to encode information about the user's state in the app before the authentication request occurred, such as the page or view they were on.

With requests to the /adminconsent endpoint, Azure AD enforces that only a tenant administrator can sign in to complete the request. The administrator will be asked to approve all the application permissions that you've requested for your app in the app registration portal.

The following screenshot is an example of the consent dialog that Azure AD presents to the administrator:

Administrator consent dialog.

Response

If the administrator approves the permissions for your application, the successful response looks like this:

// Line breaks are for legibility only.

GET https://localhost/myapp/permissions
?tenant=a8990e1f-ff32-408a-9f8e-78d3b9139b95&state=12345
&admin_consent=True
Parameter Description
tenant The directory tenant that granted your application the permissions that it requested, in GUID format.
state A value that is included in the request that also is returned in the token response. It can be a string of any content that you want. The state is used to encode information about the user's state in the app before the authentication request occurred, such as the page or view they were on.
admin_consent Set to true.

Try: You can try this for yourself by pasting the following request in a browser. If you sign in as a global administrator for an Azure AD tenant, you will be presented with the administrator consent dialog box for the app. (This will be a different app than that in the consent dialog box screenshot shown earlier.)

https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/adminconsent?client_id=6731de76-14a6-49ae-97bc-6eba6914391e&state=12345&redirect_uri=https://localhost/myapp/permissions

4. Get an access token

In the OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant flow, you use the application ID and client secret values that you saved when you registered your app to request an access token directly from the Microsoft identity platform /token endpoint.

You specify the pre-configured permissions by passing https://graph.microsoft.com/.default as the value for the scope parameter in the token request. See the scope parameter description in the token request below for details.

Token request

You send a POST request to the /token identity platform endpoint to acquire an access token:

// Line breaks are for legibility only.

POST https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant}/oauth2/v2.0/token HTTP/1.1
Host: login.microsoftonline.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

client_id=535fb089-9ff3-47b6-9bfb-4f1264799865
&scope=https%3A%2F%2Fgraph.microsoft.com%2F.default
&client_secret=qWgdYAmab0YSkuL1qKv5bPX
&grant_type=client_credentials
Parameter Condition Description
tenant Required The directory tenant that you want to request permission from. The value can be in GUID or a friendly name format.
client_id Required The application ID that the Azure app registration portal assigned when you registered your app.
scope Required The value passed for the scope parameter in this request should be the identifier (app ID URI) of the resource you want, affixed with the .default suffix. For example, the Microsoft Graph resource app ID URI is https://graph.microsoft.com/. For Microsoft Graph, the value of scope is therefore https://graph.microsoft.com/.default. This value informs the Microsoft identity platform endpoint to include in the access token all the app-level permissions the admin has consented to.
client_secret Required The client secret that you generated for your app in the app registration portal. Ensure that it's URL encoded.
grant_type Required Must be client_credentials.

Token response

A successful response looks like this:

{
  "token_type": "Bearer",
  "expires_in": 3599,
  "ext_expires_in":3599,
  "access_token": "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiIsIng1dCI6Ik1uQ19WWmNBVGZNNXBP..."
}
Parameter Description
access_token The requested access token. Your app can use this token in calls to Microsoft Graph.
expires_in How long the access token is valid (in seconds).
ext_expires_in Used to indicate an extended lifetime for the access token and to support resiliency when the token issuance service is not responding.
token_type Indicates the token type value. The only type that Azure AD supports is Bearer.

5. Use the access token to call Microsoft Graph

After you have an access token, you can use it to call Microsoft Graph by including it in the Authorization header of a request. The following request gets the profile of a specific user. Your app must have the User.Read.All permission to call this API.

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/12345678-73a6-4952-a53a-e9916737ff7f
Authorization: Bearer eyJ0eXAiO ... 0X2tnSQLEANnSPHY0gKcgw
Host: graph.microsoft.com

A successful response will look like this (some response headers have been removed):

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json;odata.metadata=minimal;odata.streaming=true;IEEE754Compatible=false;charset=utf-8
request-id: f45d08c0-6901-473a-90f5-7867287de97f
client-request-id: f45d08c0-6901-473a-90f5-7867287de97f
OData-Version: 4.0
Duration: 309.0273
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2017 19:53:49 GMT
Content-Length: 407

{
    "@odata.context":"https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/$metadata#users/$entity",
    "id":"12345678-73a6-4952-a53a-e9916737ff7f",
    "businessPhones":[
        "+1 555555555"
    ],
    "displayName":"Chris Green",
    "givenName":"Chris",
    "jobTitle":"Software Engineer",
    "mail":null,
    "mobilePhone":"+1 5555555555",
    "officeLocation":"Seattle Office",
    "preferredLanguage":null,
    "surname":"Green",
    "userPrincipalName":"ChrisG@contoso.onmicrosoft.com"
}

Supported app scenarios and resources

Apps that call Microsoft Graph under their own identity fall into one of two categories:

  • Background services (daemons) that run on a server without a signed-in user.
  • Apps that have a signed-in user but also call Microsoft Graph with their own identity. For example, to use functionality that requires more elevated privileges than the user has.

Apps that call Microsoft Graph with their own identity use the OAuth 2.0 client credentials grant to authenticate with Azure AD and get a token. For the Microsoft identity platform endpoint, you can explore this scenario further with the following resources:

Endpoint considerations

Microsoft continues to support the Azure AD endpoint. There are several differences between using the Microsoft identity platform endpoint and the Azure AD endpoint. When using the Azure AD endpoint:

  • If your app is a multi-tenant app, you must explicitly configure it to be multi-tenant in the Azure portal.
  • There's no admin consent endpoint. Instead, your app can request administrator consent during runtime by adding the prompt=admin_consent parameter to an authorization request. For more information, see Triggering the Azure AD consent framework at runtime in Integrating applications with Azure Active Directory.
  • The parameters in authorization and token requests are different. For example, there's no scope parameter in Azure AD endpoint requests; instead, the resource parameter is used to specify the URI of the resource (resource=https://graph.microsoft.com) that authorization (for administrator consent) or a token is being requested for.

You can explore this scenario further with the following resources:

See also