authelia/docs/deployment-dev.md

# Deployment for Dev

1. [Deploy With npm](#deploy-with-npm)
2. [Deploy With Docker](#deploy-with-docker)
3. [Deploy nginx](#deploy-nginx)
4. [Discard components](#discard-components)
    1. [Discard MongoDB](#discard-mongodb)
    2. [Discard Redis](#discard-redis)
    3. [Discard LDAP](#discard-ldap)
5. [FAQ](#faq)

**WARNING:** *the instructions given in this documentation are not meant
to be used for production environments since it will make **Authelia**
non resilient to failures.*

**NOTE:** If not done already, we highly recommend you first follow the
[Getting Started] documentation.

In some cases, like protecting personal websites, it can be fine to use
**Authelia** in a non highly-available manner. Fortunately, we can
achieve to run it along with one reverse proxy meaning the setup is
then reduced to only two components: Authelia and nginx.

As for a regular deployment in production, you need to install **Authelia**
either by pulling the Docker image or installing the npm package and run
it with a configuration file passed as argument.

## Deploy with npm

    npm install -g authelia
    authelia /path/to/your/config.yml

## Deploy with Docker

    docker pull clems4ever/authelia
    docker run -v /path/to/your/config.yml:/etc/authelia/config.yml clems4ever/authelia

## Deploy Nginx

You also need to install nginx and take [example/compose/nginx/minimal/nginx.conf](./example/compose/nginx/minimal/nginx.conf) as an example of configuration.

## Discard components

### Discard MongoDB

There is an option in the configuration file to discard MongoDB and use
your local filesystem to store the database data. This option will therefore
prevent you from running multiple instances of **Authelia** in parallel.
Consequently, this option is not meant to be used in production.

Here is the configuration block you should use:

    storage:
      # The directory where the DB files will be saved
      local:
        path: /var/lib/authelia/store

### Discard Redis

There is an option in the configuration file to discard Redis and use the
memory of the server to store the KV data. This option will therefore
prevent you from running multiple instances of **Authelia** in parallel and
will make you lose user sessions if the application restarts. This
concretely means that all your users will need to authenticate again in
that case. Hence, this option is not meant to be used in production.

To use memory instead of a Redis backend, just comment out the Redis
connection details in the following block:

    session:
      ...      
      # # The redis connection details
      # redis:
      #  host: redis
      #  port: 6379
      #  password: authelia

### Discard LDAP

**Authelia** can use a file backend in order to store users instead of a
LDAP server or an Active Directory. This mode will therefore prevent you
from running multiple instances of **Authelia** in parallel and is therefore
discouraged for production environments.

To use a file backend instead of a LDAP server, you should first duplicate
the file [users_database.yml](../users_database.yml) and edit it to add the
users you want.

The content of this file is as follows:

    users:
      ...
      john:
        password: "{CRYPT}$6$rounds=500000$jgiCMRyGXzoqpxS3$w2pJeZnnH8bwW3zzvoMWtTRfQYsHbWbD/hquuQ5vUeIyl9gdwBIt6RWk2S6afBA0DPakbeWgD/4SZPiS0hYtU/"
        email: john.doe@authelia.com
        groups:
          - admins
          - dev

The password is hashed and salted as it is in LDAP servers with salted SHA-512. Here is a one-liner to generate such hashed password:

    python3 -c 'import crypt; print("{CRYPT}" + crypt.crypt("mypassword", crypt.mksalt(crypt.METHOD_SHA512, rounds=500000)))'

Once the file is created, edit the configuration file with the following
block (as used in [config.minimal.yml](../config.minimal.yml)):

    authentication_backend:
      file:
        path: /etc/authelia/users_database.yml

instead of (used in [config.template.yml](../config.template.yml)):

    authentication_backend:
      ldap:
        url: ldap://openldap
        base_dn: dc=example,dc=com

        additional_users_dn: ou=users
        users_filter: cn={0}

        additional_groups_dn: ou=groups
        groups_filter: (&(member={dn})(objectclass=groupOfNames))

        group_name_attribute: cn

        mail_attribute: mail

        user: cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com
        password: password

## FAQ

### Can you give more details on why this is not suitable for production environments?

This documentation gives instructions that will make **Authelia** non
highly-available and non scalable by preventing you from running multiple
instances of the application.
This means that **Authelia** won't be able to distribute the
load accross multiple servers and it will prevent failover in case of a
crash or an hardware issue. Moreover, it will also prevent from reliably
persisting data and consequently fail access to your platform as the devices
registered by your users will be lost.

### Why is this not automated?

Well, as stated before those instructions are not meant to be applied for
a production environment. That being said, in some cases it is just fine and
so writing an Ansible playbook to automate all this process would be great.
We would really be more than happy to review such a PR.