Documentation.AI Auth
Let members of your organization sign in to your documentation with their Documentation.AI account.
Documentation.AI authentication is available on all plans.
Readers sign in with their Documentation.AI account, the same account they use to sign in to the dashboard. Every member of your organization can read your protected documentation, whatever their role: Admin, Editor or Viewer. There is no password to share and no identity provider to configure.
It suits internal documentation for a team that already works in Documentation.AI. You decide who can read by managing your organization's members.
Like Password, it gives every signed-in reader all protected pages. It doesn't support role-based access control or per-user content. For those, use JWT or OAuth 2.0.
Documentation.AI authentication works in both modes:
- Private: All pages require sign-in.
- Partial: A mix of public and protected pages. You choose which pages are public with the
publicproperty in your navigation, as described in Partial access control.
Set up
Choose access mode
In your dashboard, go to Settings > Access Control and select Private (all pages protected) or Partial (mix of public and protected pages).
Select the Documentation.AI method
In the Authentication Method selector, choose Documentation.AI, then click Save.
There is nothing else to configure. Sign-in works on your Documentation.AI subdomain, your custom domain and subpath deployments, with no callback URL to register.
Re-publish
Re-publish your documentation so the deployed site uses the updated configuration.
Add your readers
In Settings > Members, add each person who should read the documentation to your organization. The Viewer role is enough to read.
How readers sign in
- A reader opens a protected page.
- They're taken to the Documentation.AI sign-in page. If they're already signed in to the dashboard in the same browser, they go straight to the next step without signing in again.
- Documentation.AI checks that they're a member of your organization.
- They return to the page they opened, signed in.
If the account isn't a member of your organization, the reader sees a message that they don't have access to your documentation, with the email they signed in with. No session is created. They can ask one of your admins to add them, or click Use different account to sign in with another account.
Remove access
Remove the person from your organization in Settings > Members. Access is checked again every 5 minutes while someone reads, so they lose access to pages, search, the AI Assistant and the Reader MCP Server within 5 minutes.
Sessions
- Readers stay signed in for 14 days. After that, they're asked to sign in again. If they're still signed in to the dashboard, this happens without a prompt.
- Signing out of the dashboard doesn't sign them out of the documentation. To end someone's access, remove them from your organization.
AI tools and embedded docs
- AI Assistant and search work for signed-in readers, with no extra setup.
- Reader MCP Server: Readers connect their MCP client to the
/_mcp/authendpoint and sign in with their Documentation.AI account during the OAuth flow. If they're removed from your organization, the client loses access within 5 minutes. See Reader MCP Server. - Embedded docs: Your server signs users in with reader tokens. Documentation.AI doesn't check organization membership for these users, so your server decides who gets a token. See Private Docs.
Example
Your team keeps its engineering handbook at handbook.example.com. Everyone who should read it already has a Documentation.AI account. Choose Private mode with Documentation.AI authentication. Then add new joiners as Viewers in Settings > Members, and remove people when they leave.