[role="xpack"]
[[custom-roles-provider]]
=== Custom roles provider extension

If you need to retrieve user roles from a system not supported out-of-the-box
by the {es} {security-features}, you can create a custom roles provider to
retrieve and resolve
roles. You implement a custom roles provider as an SPI loaded security extension
as part of an ordinary elasticsearch plugin.

[[implementing-custom-roles-provider]]
==== Implementing a custom roles provider

To create a custom roles provider: 

. Implement the interface `BiConsumer<Set<String>, ActionListener<Set<RoleDescriptor>>>`.
  That is to say, the implementation consists of one method that takes a set of strings,
  which are the role names to resolve, and an ActionListener, on which the set of resolved
  role descriptors are passed on as the response.
. The custom roles provider implementation must take special care to not block on any I/O 
  operations.  It is the responsibility of the implementation to ensure asynchronous behavior
  and non-blocking calls, which is made easier by the fact that the `ActionListener` is
  provided on which to send the response when the roles have been resolved and the response
  is ready.

To package your custom roles provider as a plugin:

. Implement an extension class for your roles provider that implements
  `org.elasticsearch.xpack.core.security.SecurityExtension`. There you need to
  override one or more of the following methods:
+
[source,java]
----------------------------------------------------
@Override
public List<BiConsumer<Set<String>, ActionListener<Set<RoleDescriptor>>>> 
getRolesProviders(Settings settings, ResourceWatcherService resourceWatcherService) {
    ...
}
----------------------------------------------------
+
The `getRolesProviders` method is used to provide a list of custom roles providers that
will be used to resolve role names, if the role names could not be resolved by the reserved
roles or native roles stores.   The list should be returned in the order that the custom role
providers should be invoked to resolve roles.  For example, if `getRolesProviders` returns two 
instances of roles providers, and both of them are able to resolve role `A`, then the resolved 
role descriptor that will be used for role `A` will be the one resolved by the first roles 
provider in the list.
+
[source,java]
----------------------------------------------------
@Override
public List<String> getSettingsFilter() {
    ...
}
----------------------------------------------------
+
The `Plugin#getSettingsFilter` method returns a list of setting names that should be
filtered from the settings APIs as they may contain sensitive credentials. Note this method is not
part of the `SecurityExtension` interface, it's available as part of the elasticsearch plugin main class.

. Create a build configuration file for the plugin; Gradle is our recommendation.
. Create a `META-INF/services/org.elasticsearch.xpack.core.security.SecurityExtension` descriptor file for the
  extension that contains the fully qualified class name of your `org.elasticsearch.xpack.core.security.SecurityExtension` implementation
. Bundle all in a single zip file.

[[using-custom-roles-provider]]
==== Using a custom roles provider to resolve roles

To use a custom roles provider:

. Install the roles provider extension on each node in the cluster. You run
  `bin/elasticsearch-plugin` with the `install` sub-command and specify the URL
  pointing to the zip file that contains the extension. For example:
+
[source,shell]
----------------------------------------
bin/elasticsearch-plugin install file:///<path>/my-roles-provider-1.0.zip
----------------------------------------

. Add any configuration parameters for any of the custom roles provider implementations
to `elasticsearch.yml`.  The settings are not namespaced and you have access to any
settings when constructing the custom roles providers, although it is recommended to
have a namespacing convention for custom roles providers to keep your `elasticsearch.yml`
configuration easy to understand.  
+
For example, if you have a custom roles provider that 
resolves roles from reading a blob in an S3 bucket on AWS, then you would specify settings 
in `elasticsearch.yml` such as:
+
[source,js]
----------------------------------------
custom_roles_provider.s3_roles_provider.bucket: roles
custom_roles_provider.s3_roles_provider.region: us-east-1
custom_roles_provider.s3_roles_provider.secret_key: xxx
custom_roles_provider.s3_roles_provider.access_key: xxx
----------------------------------------
+
These settings will be available as the first parameter in the `getRolesProviders` method, from
where you will create and return the custom roles provider instances.

. Restart Elasticsearch.