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Authorize requests to Azure SignalR Service resources with Microsoft Entra applications

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Azure SignalR Service supports Microsoft Entra ID for authorizing requests with Microsoft Entra applications.

This article explains how to set up your resource and code to authenticate requests to the resource using a Microsoft Entra application.

Register an application in Microsoft Entra ID

The first step is to Register an application in Microsoft Entra ID:

After you register your application, you can find the Application (client) ID and Directory (tenant) ID values on the application's overview page. These GUIDs can be useful in the following steps.

Screenshot of overview information for a registered application.

Add credentials

After registering an app, you can add certificates, client secrets (a string), or federated identity credentials as credentials to your confidential client app registration. Credentials allow your application to authenticate as itself, requiring no interaction from a user at runtime, and are used by confidential client applications that access a web API.

Add role assignments in the Azure portal

The following steps describe how to assign a SignalR App Server role to a service principal or a managed identity for an Azure SignalR Service resource. For detailed steps, see Assign Azure roles using the Azure portal.

Note

A role can be assigned to any scope, including management group, subscription, resource group, or single resource. To learn more about scope, see Understand scope for Azure RBAC.

  1. In the Azure portal, go to your Azure SignalR Service resource.

  2. Select Access control (IAM) in the sidebar.

  3. Select Add > Add role assignment.

    Screenshot that shows the page for access control and selections for adding a role assignment.

  4. On the Role tab, select SignalR App Server or other SignalR built-in roles depends on your scenario.

    Role Description Use case
    SignalR App Server Access to the server connection creation and key generation APIs. Most commonly used for app server with Azure SignalR resource run in Default mode.
    SignalR Service Owner Full access to all data-plane APIs, including REST APIs, the server connection creation, and key/token generation APIs. For negotiation server with Azure SignalR resource run in Serverless mode, as it requires both REST API permissions and authentication API permissions.
    SignalR REST API Owner Full access to data-plane REST APIs. For using Azure SignalR Management SDK to manage connections and groups, but does NOT make server connections or handle negotiation requests.
    SignalR REST API Reader Read-only access to data-plane REST APIs. Use it when write a monitoring tool that calls readonly REST APIs.

  5. Select Next.

  6. For Microsoft Entra application.

    1. In the Assign access to row, select User, group, or service principal.
    2. In the Members row, click select members, then choose the identity in the pop-up window.

  7. For managed identity for Azure resources.

    1. In the Assign access to row, select Managed identity.
    2. In the Members row, click select members, then choose the application in the pop-up window.

  8. Select Next.

  9. Review your assignment, then click Review + assign to confirm the role assignment.

Important

Newly added role assignments might take up to 30 minutes to propagate.

To learn more about how to assign and manage Azure roles, see these articles:

Configure Microsoft.Azure.SignalR app server SDK for C#

Azure SignalR server SDK for C#

The Azure SignalR server SDK leverages the Azure.Identity library to generate tokens for connecting to resources. Click to explore detailed usages.

Note

The tenantId must match the tenantId of the tenant where your SignalR resource is in.

Use Microsoft Entra application with certificate

services.AddSignalR().AddAzureSignalR(option =>
{
    var credential = new ClientCertificateCredential("tenantId", "clientId", "path-to-cert");

    option.Endpoints = [
      new ServiceEndpoint(new Uri(), "https://<resource>.service.signalr.net"), credential);
    ];
});

Use Microsoft Entra application with client secret

services.AddSignalR().AddAzureSignalR(option =>
{
    var credential = new ClientSecretCredential("tenantId", "clientId", "clientSecret");

    option.Endpoints = [
      new ServiceEndpoint(new Uri(), "https://<resource>.service.signalr.net"), credential);
    ];
});

Use Microsoft Entra application with Federated identity

In the case of your organization disabled the usage of client secret/certificate, you can configure the application to trust a managed identity for authentication.

To learn more about it, see Configure an application to trust a managed identity (preview).

Note

Configure an application to trust a managed identity is a preview feature.

services.AddSignalR().AddAzureSignalR(option =>
{
    var msiCredential = new ManagedIdentityCredential("msiClientId");

    var credential = new ClientAssertionCredential("tenantId", "appClientId", async (ctoken) =>
    {
        // Entra ID US Government: api://AzureADTokenExchangeUSGov
        // Entra ID China operated by 21Vianet: api://AzureADTokenExchangeChina
        var request = new TokenRequestContext([$"api://AzureADTokenExchange/.default"]);
        var response = await msiCredential.GetTokenAsync(request, ctoken).ConfigureAwait(false);
        return response.Token;
    });

    option.Endpoints = [
        new ServiceEndpoint(new Uri(), "https://<resource>.service.signalr.net"), credential);
    ];
});

This credential will use the user-assigned managed identity to generate a clientAssertion and use it to exchange for a clientToken for authentication.

The appClientId and tenantId should be the enterprise application that you provisioned in the tenant of SignalR resource.

Use multiple endpoints

Credentials can be different for different endpoints.

In this sample, the Azure SignalR SDK will connect to resource1 with client secret and connect to resource2 with certificate.

services.AddSignalR().AddAzureSignalR(option =>
{
    var credential1 = new ClientSecretCredential("tenantId", "clientId", "clientSecret");
    var credential2 = new ClientCertificateCredential("tenantId", "clientId", "path-to-cert");

    option.Endpoints = new ServiceEndpoint[]
    {
        new ServiceEndpoint(new Uri("https://<resource1>.service.signalr.net"), credential1),
        new ServiceEndpoint(new Uri("https://<resource2>.service.signalr.net"), credential2),
    };
});

More sample can be found in this Sample link

Azure SignalR Service bindings in Azure Functions

Azure SignalR Service bindings in Azure Functions use application settings in the portal or local.settings.json locally to configure Microsoft Entra application identities to access your Azure SignalR Service resources.

First, you need to specify the service URI of Azure SignalR Service. The key of the service URI is serviceUri. It starts with a connection name prefix (which defaults to AzureSignalRConnectionString) and a separator. The separator is an underscore (__) in the Azure portal and a colon (:) in the local.settings.json file. You can customize the connection name by using the binding property ConnectionStringSetting. Continue reading to find the sample.

Then, you choose whether to configure your Microsoft Entra application identity in predefined environment variables or in SignalR-specified variables.

Configure an identity in predefined environment variables

See Environment variables for the list of predefined environment variables. When you have multiple services, we recommend that you use the same application identity, so that you don't need to configure the identity for each service. Other services might also use these environment variables, based on the settings of those services.

For example, to use client secret credentials, configure the identity as follows in the local.settings.json file:

{
  "Values": {
    "<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>:serviceUri": "https://<SIGNALR_RESOURCE_NAME>.service.signalr.net",
    "AZURE_CLIENT_ID": "...",
    "AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET": "...",
    "AZURE_TENANT_ID": "..."
  }
}

In the Azure portal, add settings as follows:

 <CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>__serviceUri=https://<SIGNALR_RESOURCE_NAME>.service.signalr.net
AZURE_CLIENT_ID = ...
AZURE_TENANT_ID = ...
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET = ...

Configure an identity in SignalR-specified variables

SignalR-specified variables share the same key prefix with the serviceUri key. Here's the list of variables that you might use:

  • clientId
  • clientSecret
  • tenantId

Here are the samples to use client secret credentials in the local.settings.json file:

{
  "Values": {
    "<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>:serviceUri": "https://<SIGNALR_RESOURCE_NAME>.service.signalr.net",
    "<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>:clientId": "...",
    "<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>:clientSecret": "...",
    "<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>:tenantId": "..."
  }
}

In the Azure portal, add settings as follows:

<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>__serviceUri = https://<SIGNALR_RESOURCE_NAME>.service.signalr.net
<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>__clientId = ...
<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>__clientSecret = ...
<CONNECTION_NAME_PREFIX>__tenantId = ...

Next steps

See the following related articles: