Hey everyone,
We’ve recently enforced SAML SSO across our Genesys Cloud organization to tighten security, which was a necessary move. However, this change has inadvertently broken our CI/CD pipelines that rely on the Platform SDK for Terraform state management and bulk updates.
The issue seems to be that the standard OAuth client credentials flow, which our service account uses, is no longer returning a valid access token. Instead, we’re getting a 401 Unauthorized response when the SDK attempts to authenticate using the client ID and secret.
Here is the relevant snippet from our Python script:
from genesyscloud.platformsdkpython import Configuration, ApiClient, PlatformApi
config = Configuration()
config.client_id = 'OUR_CLIENT_ID'
config.client_secret = 'OUR_CLIENT_SECRET'
config.oauth_host_name = 'https://login.mypurecloud.com'
api_client = ApiClient(configuration=config)
platform_api = PlatformApi(api_client)
try:
# This call fails after SAML enforcement
access_token = platform_api.get_oauth_token()
print("Token acquired:", access_token.access_token)
except Exception as e:
print("Authentication failed:", e)
The error message returned is quite generic: {"code":"unauthorized","message":"Unauthorized access"}.
I understand that SAML SSO is primarily for human users logging in via the web interface. My assumption was that service accounts using client credentials would remain unaffected since they don’t go through the SAML identity provider. It seems this assumption is incorrect, or perhaps the SAML configuration has inadvertently restricted the OAuth endpoints for non-interactive clients.
Has anyone encountered this specific conflict? Is there a way to exempt certain client IDs from the SAML enforcement, or do we need to switch to a different authentication method for our automated scripts? I’ve checked the documentation on OAuth scopes, but nothing explicitly mentions SAML interactions.
Any pointers on how to debug this or configure the SAML settings to allow programmatic access would be greatly appreciated.
SAML enforcement doesn’t actually break the client credentials grant. It just adds a layer of validation for user logins. Service accounts should still work if they’re configured correctly. The 401 usually means the service account isn’t explicitly granted the required OAuth scopes or the SAML assertion isn’t being bypassed for the service account login.
Check if your service account has the api:platform scope. Then verify the token request.
curl -X POST https://api.mypurecloud.com/api/v2/oauth/token \
-H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
-d "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&client_secret=YOUR_SECRET"
If this fails, the issue is likely in the admin console under Users > Service Accounts. Ensure the “Enable SSO” checkbox is unchecked for that specific identity. SAML applies to human users. Machine-to-machine auth stays separate. If the checkbox is on, the platform expects a SAML assertion, which your CI/CD script can’t provide. Turn it off and retry the token fetch.
Cause:
SAML enforcement in Genesys Cloud applies to interactive user logins (Authorization Code flow with PKCE) by default. It does not inherently block the Client Credentials flow for service accounts. The 401 error usually stems from one of two things: either the service account’s assigned group lacks the specific api:platform scope required for the token endpoint, or the client secret being used in the Basic Auth header is stale or incorrectly base64-encoded. The SAML setting itself is likely a red herring here.
Solution:
Verify the scope assignment first. Go to Admin > Security > Service Accounts, pick your account, and check the “Group Roles” or “API Scopes” tab. Ensure api:platform is checked. If it is, the issue is almost certainly in the curl request structure. The Authorization: Basic header must contain clientId:clientSecret base64-encoded. A common mistake is encoding just the clientId or forgetting the colon.
Here’s the exact curl command that works in our hybrid setup. Replace your-client-id and your-client-secret with your actual values.
curl -X POST https://api.mypurecloud.com/oauth/token \
-H "Authorization: Basic $(echo -n 'your-client-id:your-client-secret' | base64)" \
-H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
-d "grant_type=client_credentials&scope=api:platform"
If that still returns 401, check the audit logs for the service account. Sometimes the account gets locked after too many failed attempts, which SAML doesn’t bypass. Unlock it in Admin > Security > Service Accounts.