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Users & Access

Flywheel provides comprehensive user management, authentication, and authorization capabilities to control who can access your site and what they can do.

This section covers managing users, configuring authentication methods, controlling permissions, and using API keys for programmatic access.

Choose Your Path

New to User Management in Flywheel?

If you are new to managing users and access in Flywheel, start with our tutorial:

Getting Started: Users & Access

This tutorial will walk you through:

  • Creating your first user
  • Understanding roles and permissions
  • Assigning users to groups and projects
  • Configuring authentication

Need to Perform a Specific Task?

Jump directly to the how-to guides:

Want to Understand the Concepts?

Learn about how Flywheel handles users and access:

Key Concepts

Authentication vs Authorization

  • Authentication determines who you are (sign-in methods like ORCID, CILogon, institutional SSO)
  • Authorization determines what you can do (roles and permissions at site, group, and project levels)

Three Levels of Access Control

Flywheel uses a hierarchical permission system:

  1. Site Level - Broad roles (Admin, Developer, User) that control platform-wide capabilities
  2. Group Level - Controls what users can do within a group (Admin, read-write, read-only)
  3. Project Level - Fine-grained control over specific projects (including custom roles)

Common Tasks

User Management

Authorization

Authentication

API Keys

Reference