Identify customers - Glean Feed

Signed identity connects a customer signed in to your product with their Glean Feed portal account. Use it when customers should submit, vote, comment, or react without a second sign-in.

Generate signatures only on your server. Never put the workspace widget secret in browser code, a mobile app, source control, or a client-visible environment variable.

Requirements

Customer accounts must be enabled in the workspace’s portal settings.
Copy the workspace ID and widget secret from the dashboard.
Use a stable customer ID from your own system.
Keep userId at 200 characters or fewer, name at 120, and email at 320.

The same signed customer token can also authorize browser-direct headless feedback, but the server boundary below applies whether you use the packaged widget or a custom UI.

1. Sign the customer on your server

If email is present, trim and lowercase it, then sign a JSON array containing workspace ID, customer ID, and canonical email. Without email, sign workspaceId:userId.

import { createHmac } from "node:crypto";

export function signGleanFeedCustomer({ workspaceId, userId, email, widgetSecret }) {
  const canonicalEmail = email?.trim().toLowerCase();
  const payload = canonicalEmail
    ? JSON.stringify([workspaceId, userId, canonicalEmail])
    : `${workspaceId}:${userId}`;

  return createHmac("sha256", widgetSecret).update(payload).digest("hex");
}

The signature covers the workspace ID, customer ID, and email when present. name is not part of the signature payload.

2. Initialize with the signed customer

Send only the signed customer object—not the secret—to the browser:

window.GleanFeed.init({
  workspace: "acme",
  workspaceId: "YOUR_WORKSPACE_ID",
  portalBaseUrl: "https://gleanfeed.com",
  user: {
    userId: "customer-123",
    email: "person@example.com",
    name: "Person Example",
    signature: "SERVER_GENERATED_HEX_SIGNATURE",
  },
});

You can also call await window.GleanFeed.identify(user) after initialization. Reidentify after the signed-in customer changes.

3. Confirm identity

Open the widget and submit a test request or vote. Confirm the interaction appears under the expected customer in the dashboard. In launcher mode, signed customers can also receive an unread notification badge. If the email matches a pending invite-only board invitation, successful identity grants access to that board automatically.

Failure behavior

Missing workspaceId, disabled customer accounts, invalid or oversized fields, an invalid signature, or a failed request creates no new signed session. A new identification also fails with an identity mismatch if the email belongs to a workspace team member’s preserved portal history. An already-established signed customer with the same userId and email remains separate and continues to work. For a new customer collision, use a different customer email or omit the email and identify that customer by userId; Glean Feed never merges a signed customer into team history. Free and Starter plans also limit the number of tracked customers. Identifying a customer for the first time returns 403 with code: "customer_limit" after the workspace reaches that limit. Existing identified customers continue to work, including in workspaces that are already over the limit. See customer account limits for plan amounts and what counts. The widget falls back to anonymous browsing only when there is no existing embedded portal session; a failed reidentification does not clear an existing session. Use troubleshooting if the test interaction remains anonymous.

​Requirements

​1. Sign the customer on your server

​2. Initialize with the signed customer

​3. Confirm identity

​Failure behavior

Requirements

1. Sign the customer on your server

2. Initialize with the signed customer

3. Confirm identity

Failure behavior