Authentik: The Authentication Glue Your Projects Need
Ever find yourself building yet another login system? Or maybe you're trying to wire up a bunch of internal tools, a custom app, and a legacy service so they all share the same set of credentials? It's a universal developer headache. You need authentication, but building it from scratch is a time sink, and cobbling together different solutions becomes a maintenance nightmare.
Enter Authentik. It bills itself as "the authentication glue you need," and that's a pretty spot-on description. It's an open-source Identity Provider that sits in the middle of your infrastructure, handling user logins, permissions, and connections to all your other services, so you don't have to.
What It Does
In simple terms, Authentik is a self-hosted single sign-on (SSO) and identity bridge. It acts as a central hub for authentication. You can point your applications—whether they're modern web apps, legacy systems, or DevOps tools—to Authentik for login. It then handles verifying users, whether they're coming from your local user directory, an external provider like Google or GitHub, or even an LDAP server.
Think of it as the universal adapter for your auth layer. Instead of each app having its own login database or needing custom integration work, they just plug into Authentik.
Why It's Cool
The real power of Authentik is in its flexibility and its "glue" mentality. It's not trying to lock you into one ecosystem.
- It Speaks Every Protocol: Need OAuth2/OpenID Connect for your modern SPA? Check. SAML for that enterprise SaaS tool? Got it. LDAP and Radius for legacy systems or network gear? Yep. It even supports SCIM for user provisioning. This means you can unify authentication across wildly different technologies.
- Flows, Not Just Config: Authentik uses a visual "flow" editor to design authentication and enrollment processes. Want to add a custom disclaimer, a two-factor prompt, or an email verification step? You can build that sequence visually, which is often clearer than a wall of YAML.
- Developer-Friendly: It has a straightforward REST API, detailed logs for debugging auth issues, and a Terraform provider. You can manage and automate it like any other piece of your infrastructure.
- Self-Hosted & Open Source: You control all the data. This is crucial for internal tools, compliance, or just avoiding vendor lock-in.
How to Try It
The easiest way to kick the tires is with their official demo. You can explore the admin interface with a pre-configured setup: Check out the Authentik Demo
To run it yourself, they provide several one-liner install options. The simplest is using Docker Compose. Just make sure you have Docker installed, then:
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/goauthentik/authentik/version-2023.10/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml
docker-compose up -d
This will spin up the core services. Once running, navigate to http://localhost:9000 (or your server's IP). The initial setup wizard will guide you through creating your first admin account. From there, you can start connecting applications and playing with flows.
Final Thoughts
Authentik feels like a tool built by developers who were tired of the auth problem. It doesn't overcomplicate things; it just provides a solid, extensible hub that gets out of your way. If you're managing more than a couple of applications, especially a mix of old and new, it can save you a ton of repetitive integration work and centralize your security controls.
It might be overkill for a single tiny side project, but for any internal platform, homelab, or mid-size project ecosystem, it's absolutely worth a look. You can stop being an authentication plumber and get back to building the features that actually matter.
@githubprojects