Enable access only for users from your application

This article describes how to protect your knowledge base from public access and not require a dedicated login from your application users at the same time.

Before you use this feature, it is important to have the following in mind:

Knowledge base access will be possible only through a special link in your application, not through the knowledge base domain directly. E.g. Users will be able to access the knowledge base through the Life Ring button, but not by typing help.yourapp.com directly into the browser. The exception is a subsequent access in a short time since we remember the user for some time.
The user identification verification feature must be enabled and implemented in your Product Fruits installation.

How to set up

First, implement the User Identity Verification.

Then, enable the "Through workspace User identity verification" switch in the Authentication methods settings.

You can also select if all articles or only selected articles should be protected by switching the Access management mode.

Accessing articles

Once the setup is done, you have several options to enable access to protected articles for your users.

Special link

Placeholder in Product Fruits tools

To allow your users to access the protected content, you can use the special placeholder {{$hmac}} in Product Fruits content. For example, you can create a link item in the Life Ring Button to your knowledge base in this format: https://help.myapp.com?{{$hmac}}. By using this link, your users will get access to the knowledge base.

Custom link

If you want to place this link somewhere in your UI, you can also construct the link manually. The knowledge base URL accepts the hmac query parameter. In this JavaScript example, you can get the idea how to construct the link:

var hmac = {
    username: "the current user username",
    hmac: {
        hash: "HMAC hash from your backend code",
        expiration: expirationJsonDateTimeIfUsed ?? undefined // "yyyy-mm-ddThh:MM:ss"
    }
}

console.log(`https://help.yourapp.com?hmac=${encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(hmac))}`)

Life Ring Button - individual articles

You can put individual articles into the Life Ring button as you would put them normally. Product Fruits will take care of the verification. In this use case, verified users will be able to read the article inside of the Life Ring.