authelia/docs/content/en/integration/proxies/swag.md

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SWAG An integration guide for Authelia and the SWAG reverse proxy A guide on integrating Authelia with SWAG. 2022-06-15T17:51:47+10:00 false
integration
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proxies
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/i/swag

SWAG is a reverse proxy supported by Authelia. It's an NGINX proxy container with bundled configurations to make your life easier.

Important: When using these guides it's important to recognize that we cannot provide a guide for every possible method of deploying a proxy. These guides show a suggested setup only and you need to understand the proxy configuration and customize it to your needs. To-that-end we include links to the official proxy documentation throughout this documentation and in the See Also section.

Introduction

As SWAG is a NGINX proxy with curated configurations, integration of Authelia with SWAG is very easy and you only need to enabled two includes.

Note: All paths in this guide are the locations inside the container. You will have to either edit the files within the container or adapt the path to the path you have mounted the relevant container path to.

Get Started

It's strongly recommended that users setting up Authelia for the first time take a look at our Get Started guide. This takes you through various steps which are essential to bootstrapping Authelia.

Requirements

SWAG supports the required NGINX requirements for Authelia out-of-the-box.

SWAG Caveat

One current caveat of the SWAG implementation is that it serves Authelia as a subpath for each domain by default. We strongly recommend instead of using the defaults that you configure Authelia as a subdomain if possible.

There are two potential ways to achieve this:

  1. Adjust the default authelia-server.conf as per the included directions.
  2. Use the supplementary configuration snippets provided officially by Authelia.

This is partly because WebAuthn requires that the domain is an exact match when registering and authenticating and it is possible that due to web standards this will never change.

In addition this represents a bad user experience in some instances such as:

  • Users sometimes visit the https://app.example.com/authelia URL which doesn't automatically redirect the user to https://app.example.com (if they visit https://app.example.com then they'll be redirected to authenticate then redirected back to their original URL)
  • Administrators may wish to setup OpenID Connect 1.0 in which case it also doesn't represent a good user experience as the issuer will be https://app.example.com/authelia for example
  • Using the SWAG default configurations are more difficult to support as our specific familiarity is with our own example snippets

Option 1: Adjusting the Default Configuration

Open the generated authelia-server.conf. Adjust the following sections. There are two snippets, one before and one after. The only lines that change are the set $authelia_backend lines, and this configuration assumes you're serving Authelia at auth.example.com.

    ## Set $authelia_backend to route requests to the current domain by default
    set $authelia_backend $http_host;
    ## In order for WebAuthn to work with multiple domains authelia must operate on a separate subdomain
    ## To use authelia on a separate subdomain:
    ##  * comment the $authelia_backend line above
    ##  * rename /config/nginx/proxy-confs/authelia.conf.sample to /config/nginx/proxy-confs/authelia.conf
    ##  * make sure that your dns has a cname set for authelia
    ##  * uncomment the $authelia_backend line below and change example.com to your domain
    ##  * restart the swag container
    #set $authelia_backend authelia.example.com;

    return 302 https://$authelia_backend/authelia/?rd=$target_url;
    ## Set $authelia_backend to route requests to the current domain by default
    # set $authelia_backend $http_host;
    ## In order for WebAuthn to work with multiple domains authelia must operate on a separate subdomain
    ## To use authelia on a separate subdomain:
    ##  * comment the $authelia_backend line above
    ##  * rename /config/nginx/proxy-confs/authelia.conf.sample to /config/nginx/proxy-confs/authelia.conf
    ##  * make sure that your dns has a cname set for authelia
    ##  * uncomment the $authelia_backend line below and change example.com to your domain
    ##  * restart the swag container
    set $authelia_backend auth.example.com;

    return 302 https://$authelia_backend/authelia/?rd=$target_url;

Option 2: Using the Authelia Supplementary Configuration Snippets

See standard NGINX guide (which can be used with SWAG) and run Authelia as it's own subdomain.

Trusted Proxies

Important: You should read the Forwarded Headers section and this section as part of any proxy configuration. Especially if you have never read it before.

To configure trusted proxies for SWAG see the NGINX section on Trusted Proxies. Adapting this to SWAG is beyond the scope of this documentation.

Assumptions and Adaptation

This guide makes a few assumptions. These assumptions may require adaptation in more advanced and complex scenarios. We can not reasonably have examples for every advanced configuration option that exists. The following are the assumptions we make:

  • Deployment Scenario:
    • Single Host
    • Authelia is deployed as a Container with the container name authelia on port 9091
    • Proxy is deployed as a Container on a network shared with Authelia
  • The above assumption means that AUthelia should be accesible to the proxy on http://authelia:9091 and as such:
    • You will have to adapt all instances of the above URL to be https:// if Authelia configuration has a TLS key and certificate defined
    • You will have to adapt all instances of authelia in the URL if:
      • you're using a different container name
      • you deployed the proxy to a different location
    • You will have to adapt all instances of 9091 in the URL if:
      • you have adjusted the default port in the configuration
    • You will have to adapt the entire URL if:
      • Authelia is on a different host to the proxy
  • All services are part of the example.com domain:
    • This domain and the subdomains will have to be adapted in all examples to match your specific domains unless you're just testing or you want ot use that specific domain

Docker Compose

The following docker compose example has various applications suitable for setting up an example environment.

It uses the nginx image from [linuxserver.io] which includes all of the required modules including the http_set_misc module.

It also includes the nginx-proxy-confs mod where they have several configuration examples in the /config/nginx/proxy-confs directory. This can be omitted if desired.

If you're looking for a more complete solution [linuxserver.io] also have an nginx container called SWAG which includes ACME and various other useful utilities.

{{< details "docker-compose.yaml" >}}

---
version: "3.8"

networks:
  net:
    driver: 'bridge'

services:
  swag:
    container_name: 'swag'
    image: 'lscr.io/linuxserver/swag'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - '${PWD}/data/swag:/config'
      ## Uncomment the line below if you want to use the Authelia configuration snippets.
      #- ${PWD}/data/nginx/snippets:/snippets:ro
    environment:
      PUID: '1000'
      PGID: '1000'
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
      URL: 'example.com'
      SUBDOMAINS: 'www,whoami,auth,nextcloud,'
      VALIDATION: 'http'
      CERTPROVIDER: 'cloudflare'
      ONLY_SUBDOMAINS: 'false'
      STAGING: 'true'
    cap_add:
      - 'NET_ADMIN'
  authelia:
    container_name: 'authelia'
    image: 'authelia/authelia'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    expose:
      - 9091
    volumes:
      - '${PWD}/data/authelia/config:/config'
    environment:
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
  nextcloud:
    container_name: 'nextcloud'
    image: 'lscr.io/linuxserver/nextcloud'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    expose:
      - 443
    volumes:
      - '${PWD}/data/nextcloud/config:/config'
      - '${PWD}/data/nextcloud/data:/data'
    environment:
      PUID: '1000'
      PGID: '1000'
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
  whoami:
    container_name: 'whoami'
    image: 'docker.io/traefik/whoami'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    expose:
      - 80
    environment:
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
...

{{< /details >}}

Prerequisite Steps

In the SWAG /config mount which is mounted to ${PWD}/data/swag in our example:

  1. Create a folder named snippets/authelia:
    • The mkdir -p ${PWD}/data/swag/nginx/snippets/authelia command should achieve this on Linux.
  2. Create the ${PWD}/data/swag/nginx/snippets/authelia/location.conf file which can be found here.
  3. Create the ${PWD}/data/swag/nginx/snippets/authelia/authrequest.conf file which can be found here.
    • Ensure you adjust the line error_page 401 =302 https://auth.example.com/?rd=$target_url; replacing https://auth.example.com/ with your external Authelia URL.

Protected Application

In the server configuration for the application you want to protect:

  1. Edit the /config/nginx/proxy-confs/ file for the application you wish to protect.
  2. Under the #include /config/nginx/authelia-server.conf; line which should be within the server block but not inside any location blocks add the following line: include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/location.conf;.
  3. Under the #include /config/nginx/authelia-location.conf; line which should be within the applications location block add the following line include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/authrequest.conf;.

Example

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;

    server_name whoami.*;

    include /config/nginx/ssl.conf;

    client_max_body_size 0;

    # Authelia: Step 1.
    #include /config/nginx/authelia-server.conf;
    include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/location.conf;

    location / {
        # Authelia: Step 2.
        #include /config/nginx/authelia-location.conf;
        include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/authrequest.conf;

        include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
        resolver 127.0.0.11 valid=30s;
        set $upstream_app whoami;
        set $upstream_port 80;
        set $upstream_proto http;
        proxy_pass $upstream_proto://$upstream_app:$upstream_port;
    }
}

See Also