What’s everyones recommendations for a self-hosted authentication system?
My requirements are basically something lightweight that can handle logins for both regular users and google. I only have 4-5 total users.
So far, I’ve looked at and tested:
- Authentik - Seems okay, but also really slow for some reason. I’m also not a fan of the username on one page, password on the next screen flow
- Keycloak - Looks like it might be lighter in resources these days, but definitely complicated to use
- LLDAP - I’d be happy to use it for the ldap backend, but it doesn’t solve the whole problem
- Authelia - No web ui, which is fine, but also doesn’t support social logins as far as I can tell. I think it would be my choice if it did support oidc
- Zitadel - Sounds promising, but I spent a couple hours troubleshooting it just to get it working. I might go back to it, but I’ve had the most trouble with it so far and can’t even compare the actual config yet
Keycloak seems complicated, but it’s actually not that complicated if you use it for simple OIDC provider.
Just create a new realm, then go to client -> create. Enter your client-id, with openid-connect as protocol. Then, set access type to “confidential”, set valid redirect uri to “https://<your app>” (or even “https://*” if you’re lazy and want to use it on multiple apps). Then hit save and go to the credential tab to copy your client secret. Then head to “users” menu to start adding users to your realm.
That’s the basic setup which should be good for home use. The good thing about keycloak is, as you grow your homelab, whatever stuff you may need later can be provided by keycloak. Want some users to have access to app A, but not app B? 2 factor auth? Allow users to login with google account? Heck, allow users to login with another sso provider (chaining)? You can do pretty much anything.
Why not keep everything in your LAN and setup a wire guard bastion ?
That’s essentially what I am doing. Everything is on the LAN by default. I have two instances of Traefik. One that runs only on internal VPN ips, and another on remote servers using public ips. So I can choose which services are accessible over lan/vpn or public (routed through a vpn to lan).
That doesn’t solve the authentication problem if I want to expose something to the internet though, or even sso inside the lan.
I use authentik. The login flow is a little weird I agree, my password manager doesn’t like it too. Besides that, from the ones I used it’s definitely the most stable and developed (I was using authelia before).
I can’t quite figure out how to use it with proxy auth.
I’ve been using Authelia for almost 2 years and I really like it. Never had any issues.
I use nforwardauth . It is simple, but only supports username/password
