Use Cases

Toast

Toast offers a restaurant point of sale and management service. The Toast technical documentation site provides administrator and API developer documentation.

One challenge we have is that a large amount of our administration documentation is written for internal employees (our cloud service has important configuration done by external users and also important configuration done by internal employees). We need to make it as easy as possible for external readers to use our documentation, and we need to restrict the internal documentation to internal employees (but also make it easy to access and use).

What makes mod_auth_openidc so valuable for us is that it gives our employees seamless web access to our restricted internal documentation set. Since we use Google account authentication for other employee services, employees can open the internal documentation web site without any additional sign-in needed. From a documentation writer's perspective, asking a reader to actively sign in before reading documentation is effectively preventing adoption of that documentation as a resource. The immediate spike in page views in our protected content showed us the value we gained from the low-barrier authentication model in mod_auth_openidc.

We include mod_auth_openidc in our Apache HTTP server configuration and deploy it to a cloud server using Docker.