Simple guide to self hosted authentication?

andy47@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 44 points –

I'd like to set up my identity and authentication service for my self hosted applications but it is not a beginner friendly subject.

I'm aware of the various tools available; authentik, authelia, LLDAP, keycloak, etc and see lots of useful discussions on them which is great.

But I can't seem to find a beginner friendly introduction to setting up one or more of these tools that helps me understand the core concepts at the same time. Does such a thing exist?

I'd like to try out LLDAP and Authelia on my home lab and then possibly roll this out to my production services.

But every tutorial I've come across seems to assume a fair amount of knowledge that I don't think I have.

For instance if I deploy LLDAP what should I use as my base DN? And how can I seperate a homelab directory from a seperate production directory?

Any pointers gratefully received.

15

Simplest would be Authelia and Swag.

Swag comes with prewritten config files and all you really need to do is uncomment a few lines and make sure it's pointed to your service.

Linuxserver.io guides are good for this.

I ended up landing on Keycloak and I believe I set mine up using the ansible script, again it's a matter of plugging in some details.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll check it out. I don't think I've come across SWAG before, and a web search comes up with lots of references to sleeping bags (I'm in Australia - https://outbackreview.com.au/best-swags-australia/). Could you provide pointers and/or a homepage? Thanks in advance.

Ok, I found this - https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-26-setting-up-authelia.

Which, if I'm reading it correctly tells me that SWAG (Secure Web Application Gateway) is essentially a web server, reverse proxy with lets encrypt support. It doesn't seem to do any authentication.

Authelia is a component of an identity and authentication solution that provides single sign on and 2FA but, crucially, does not include a user directory, by default it uses a YAML file but can be connected to an LDAP server - https://www.authelia.com/overview/authentication/first-factor/

Which I think goes towards the point in my original post - none of this is simple so I'd like a nice explanation that helps me understand what I need running, how they work together and what settings to use.

You probably need to realise that this is advanced self hosting here.

I might suggest you start off with something a bit simpler.

Run an application, do DNS, point Nginx to it, get certbot and follow the instructions on their site to implement it. Read logs. Update stuff. Break stuff.

You need to build up to it, because Authentication is a compilation of 5-6 different basic tasks that you need to be across. And if you mess up any of them, it won't work and you need to work out why.

Thanks. I have all of that. I've been at this for a while and am now looking to move to centralised authentication and access management because I've got everything else working as I want it. It's just not ideal to have to maintain seperate logins across each of the services that I'm running. Hence starting to look at authentication. I know it's complex and the original post was wondering if there is a nice simple introduction to the subject matter.

Yep if you've got the requisite skills the linuxserver guide is the best for authelia.

I've also ran Keycloak via the red hat documentation.

That's really as easy as it gets..if you want to learn, be prepared to pile through the documentation.

Secure Web Application Gateway.

And something like "swag selfhosted" or "swag linuxserver" would have been a better search term. You need to lead the horse at least slightly in the direction of water when it comes to Google searches.

I don't have a simple guide, but it's probably a good idea to reduce the number of moving parts if you're trying to keep stuff simple. So pick something that has all the features in-one (user management, authentication, authorization, ...). They might not be the best at ever single thing (they almost certainly won't), but doing it all usually means that it's easier to configure and you don't need to wire multiple things together.

I've recently moved from Authelia to Authentik due to some features that I was missing/wishing for, but between those two I'd definitely say Authenlia is easier to get running initially (and you don't need external LDAP for it, as others have mentioned).

You'll probably still need a proxy that can do proxy auth because not all services can do OICD/OAuth2. I'm using Traefik, but heard that Caddy is easier to set up initially (can't compare myself).

I know this isn’t what you’re asking for but I think this is still a good starting point. Like you correctly surmised, identity and authentication management is not an easy subject and does require extensive experience and theory.

Hint: you don't have to use ldap to use authelia (I haven't bothered). It's a bit awkward to use though, I'd only recommend it for single-user setups (I wish they would just add support for SQLite, they already use it for 2fa and stuff)

what should I use as my base DN?

I posted this a while ago about LDAP basics: https://lemmy.world/comment/1539633

The base DN is usually the DN under which your user accounts (inetOrgPersons) can be found. In my case it is ou=users,dc=example,dc=org.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
nginx Popular HTTP server

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

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