Please verify that this feature request has NOT been suggested before.

• I checked and didn't find a similar feature request

Problem statement

This issue continues the discussion started here. To repeat the main idea:

I am part of a local chaos community that interacts with other regional chaos communities on a regular basis. Since all of these communities have their own assets inside their hacker/maker spaces, we wanted to implement some kind of inventory management system and collectively agreed on using InvenTree which makes it a common standard among our communities. Since those communities are decentralized and run their own independent infrastructure, they also have different InvenTree instances and authentication providers.

Since we share items across communities regularly, we wanted to have some functionality to share items across instances, so we can always keep track of the current location of our items. Since we trust the other communities, we also want to give them access to our InvenTree instance and manage the user permissions independently.

Suggested solution

The first idea that came to our mind was making InvenTree an OIDC provider.

Since we do not want to force other communities or individuals to some specific identity provider, we thought it would make sense for InvenTree to become its own identity provider (using the established OIDC standard) so that even communities/individuals using the integrated InvenTree (Django) accounts could authenticate against our instance using their respective account credentials. For now, this PR would allow us to give users of trusted InvenTree instances access to our instance simply by adding the foreign InvenTree instance as an OIDC provider. The users of this instance would the be able to manipulate items in our InvenTree. Based on this functionality, there should be features added in the future that allow for sharing resources like items and perhaps categories across instances using the InvenTree web GUI.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The following idea was provided by @matmair:

why not use/build around ActivityPub and Mastodon? We could implement a notification provider with ActivityPub and use Mastdons OAuth to do authentication.

Examples of other systems

We might get some inspiration from nextcloud or the fediverse (e.g. looking at mastodon or some gitea federation proposals)

Do you want to develop this?

• I want to develop this.