Your social login provider doesn’t work

Following something that somebody told you, you’ve added the authentication.providers setting and defined Facebook as a social login provider:

And, when you bring up your sign-in screen, the Facebook button appears right where you’d expect it to appear:

And yet, after all that, when you click Facebook you get the following error:

What did you do to deserve this?

Listen, don’t feel bad: you didn’t do anything wrong. Instead, the problem is likely due to something that you didn’t do. Let’s see if we can explain what we mean by that.

To begin with, Hosted Login allows you to include any Identity Cloud-supported social login provider in your sign-in screen. For example, some social login IdPs – like Doximity, Medy, and Fimnet – are not available by default, and require special setup and configuration. The test application used in creating this documentation does not have access to these IdPs. Nevertheless, we included all three of them in the value of the authentication.providers setting:

And guess what? When we bring up our sign-in screen, this is what we see:

The point of this? Just to illustrate that Hosted Login lets you add any valid social login provider to your list of allowed providers, but it doesn’t attempt to verify whether you’re able to actually use any of those social login providers.

And that’s the problem we’re facing with Facebook. If we log on to our Social Login Dashboard we see that Facebook hasn't been configured as a social login provider; we know that because Facebook’s gear icon is colored gray:

To use Facebook as a social login provider, we’ll have to follow the instructions in the Facebook Social Login Configuration Guide in order to create a Facebook app and then configure that app for social login. As soon as we’ve done that, Facebook’s gear icon turns green:

And at that point we can use Facebook for social login: