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Logging out

CentralAuth NPM library​

When using the CentralAuth NPM library, you can log out a user by calling the logout method on the CentralAuthClass instance. This method takes a Request object of the current request as an argument. It will return a Response object that removes the session from the user's cookie and redirects the user to the return_to URL. The second argument of the logout method is an optional config object that can contain the following properties:

  • return_to: The URL to redirect the user to after logging out.
  • logoutSessionWide: A boolean value that indicates whether to log out the user from all applications. If this value is set to true, the user will be logged out from all applications that are using this user session. If this value is set to false, the user will only be logged out from the current application. The default value is false.
note

The logoutSessionWide option is only applicable when you have enabled the autologin option. See the organization settings section for more information.

note

When using the CentralAuthHTTPClass subclass, the logout method is called logoutHTTP. This method takes an IncomingMessage and ServerResponse object. The logoutHTTP method does not return a Response object, but instead sends the redirect response directly to the client.

Manual integration​

If you cannot use the NPM library, you can log out a user manually. Simply deleting the user's access token from local storage or cookies will log the user out from your application. If you have enabled the autologin option and want to log out the user from all applications, you have to make a POST request to the CentralAuth logout endpoint. The base URL for the logout endpoint is https://centralauth.com/api/v1/logout. The POST body must contain the user's access token as plain text.

Set the Authorization header of the request to a base64 encoded string of the client ID and client secret of your application, separated by a colon. The client ID and client secret can be found on the CentralAuth dashboard. The format of the header is Basic base64(client_id:client_secret). The client_id and client_secret can be found on the integration page of the CentralAuth dashboard.

CURL example

Replace CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET and ACCESS_TOKEN with the values of your application and the user's session.

# Create the Authorization header by base64 encoding "CLIENT_ID:CLIENT_SECRET"
AUTH_HEADER=$(echo -n "CLIENT_ID:CLIENT_SECRET" | base64)

curl -X POST https://centralauth.com/api/v1/logout \
  -H "Authorization: Basic $AUTH_HEADER" \
  -H "Content-Type: text/plain" \
  -d "ACCESS_TOKEN"

The request will return an empty response with a 200 OK status code. If the request fails, the response will contain an error message.

info

Both an access token and ID token can be used to log out the user.