Action(Machine To Machine)

[shieng.ng]

Can somebody explain what is Machine to machine in Action Flow, is hard to understand in description in the auth0 documentation.

Runs - When an access token is issued via the Client Credentials Flow
Example Uses - Prevent tokens from being issued, add custom claims to the access token.

Can someone explain when to use it and how to use it. I can’t undestand the information in the documentation.

[rueben.tiow]

Hi @shieng.ng,

Thanks for reaching out to the Auth0 Community!

The Machine-to-Machine Action flow is used whenever the Client Credentials Flow is performed. It’s important to note that different Application Grant Types use different flows for getting an access token.

In the case of the Client Credentials flow, it involves an M2M (Machine-to-Machine) application requesting an access token.

So now one way we can use an M2M Action script could be to cache the token issued to the M2M application. This way when the M2M Application requests for an access token, it can use the cached token instead, which decreases your machine-to-machine authentication consumption and prevent you from going over quota utilization.

In summary, the M2M Action script is used for M2M Applications that are requesting an access token (Client Credentials flow).

I hope the explanation was clear!

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Rueben