Get An Identity

A service that allows trainee teachers, applicants, praticipants and teachers to get an identity that they can use across DfE Teacher Services digital services and allows the DfE to provide better user experiences by joining user data across the services to prevent re-keying details.

Environments

Information coming soon...

Useful Links

Name	URL
Design History	get-an-identity
Tech. Arch.	high-level-technical-design
ADR'S	technical-decisions
Tech Docs	tech-docs-site
TRN Design	trn-design-history

Details and configuration

Name	Description	Status
Production	Public site	Coming Soon
Pre-production	For internal use by DfE to test deploys	Coming Soon
Test	For external use to test	Coming Soon
Development	For internal use by DfE for dev.	Coming Soon

Dependencies

• TBC

How the application works

The application will provide an authentication server for teacher services digital applications (clients) to use in order to provide an "account" style function (where needed), authentication and authorisation flows based on OIDC/OAUTH 2.0 protocols. It will define and make available to clients a set of data scopes, containing data claims relating to the end user. The service will create and store a unique identifier for the end user. This identifier can be used by clients to create a foreign key data relationship for that user allowing us to more easily tie data sets together (without using TRN's), in order to provide better data insights for more effective policy making, better interventions on behalf of our users and address data errors, gaps and duplications. As well as providing a transactional level service we will also hook into our analytical data stores to enable more accurate and effieicent metrics and reporting at user level.

We keep track of architecture decisions in Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

Setup

Developer setup

Software requirements

The API is an ASP.NET Core 7 web application. To develop locally you will need the following installed:

• Visual Studio 2022 (or the .NET 7 SDK and an alternative IDE/editor);
• a local Postgres 13+ instance;
• SASS.

Initial setup

Initialise / update git submodules using the following command:

git submodule update --init --remote

Install Postgres then add a connection string to user secrets for the TeacherIdentityServer, TeacherIdentityAuthServerTests and TeacherIdentityServerEndToEndTests projects.

dotnet user-secrets --id TeacherIdentityServer set ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection "Host=localhost;Username=your_postgres_user;Password=your_postgres_password;Database=teacher_identity"
dotnet user-secrets --id TeacherIdentityAuthServerTests set ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection "Host=localhost;Username=your_postgres_user;Password=your_postgres_password;Database=teacher_identity_tests"
dotnet user-secrets --id TeacherIdentityServerEndToEndTests set AuthorizationServer:ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection "Host=localhost;Username=your_postgres_user;Password=your_postgres_password;Database=teacher_identity_e2etests"

Where your_postgres_user and your_postgres_password are the username and password of your Postgres installation, respectively.

Next set the email address you want to use for local development.

dotnet user-secrets --id TeacherIdentityServer set DeveloperEmail "your_email_address"

Where your_email_address is an email address you can access.

Ask a developer on the team for additional user secrets for integration with other services (e.g. DQT).

Finally run the DevBootstrap project. This will create the database, add an admin user account and configure the OIDC clients for local development.

Test client

The solution includes a test client that is used for testing end-to-end OIDC flows. Once initial setup has been done, you should be able to launch both the TeacherIdentity.AuthServer project and the TeacherIdentity.TestClient project and browse to https://localhost:7261 to start the sign in journey and sign in with the email address your configured above.

Pre-commit hooks

Install Lefthook then run lefthook install. This will install a pre-commit hook that will lint any staged .cs files.

BigQuery

Information coming soon...

Intellisense

Information coming soon...

Linting

Information coming soon...

Testing

Information coming soon...

Ops manual

Information coming soon...

Licence

MIT Licence.