authelia/example/kube

Authelia on Kubernetes

Authelia is now available on Kube in order to protect your most critical applications using 2-factor authentication.

Getting started

In order to deploy Authelia on Kube, we must have a cluster at hand. If you don't, please follow the next section otherwise skip it and go to the next.

Set up a Kube cluster

Hopefully for us, spawning a development cluster from scratch has become very easy lately with the use of minikube. This project creates a VM on your computer and start a Kube cluster inside it. It also configure a CLI called kubectl so that you can deploy applications in the cluster right away.

Basically, you need to follow the instruction from the repository. It should be a matter of downloading the binary and start the cluster with two commands:

curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64 && chmod +x minikube && sudo mv minikube /usr/local/bin/
minikube start # you can use --vm-driver flag for selecting your hypervisor (virtualbox by default otherwise)

After few seconds, your cluster should be working and you should be able to get access to the cluster by creating a proxy with

kubectl proxy

and visiting http://localhost:8001/ui

Deploy Authelia

Once the cluster is ready and you can access it, run the following command to deploy Authelia:

./bootstrap.sh

In order to visit the test applications that have been deployed to test Authelia, edit your /etc/hosts and add the following lines replacing the IP with the IP of your VM given by minikube:

192.168.39.26       login.kube.example.com
192.168.39.26       app1.kube.example.com
192.168.39.26       app2.kube.example.com
192.168.39.26       mail.kube.example.com
192.168.39.26       home.kube.example.com

Once done, you can visit http://home.kube.example.com and follow the instructions written in the page

How does it work?

Authentication via Authelia

In a Kube clusters, the routing logic of requests is handled by ingress controllers which follow the provided ingress configurations.

In this setup, requests goes through a ingress-nginx controller which forward verification requests to Authelia in order to allow or deny access.

The authentication is provided at the ingress level by an annotation called nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-url that is filled with the URL of Authelia's verification endpoint. The ingress controller also requires the ingress provides the URL of the authentication portal in case the user is not yet authenticated.

Those annotations can be seen in apps/secure-ingress.yml configuration.

Production grade infrastructure

What is great about using ingress-nginx is that it is compatible with kube-lego that makes renewal of SSL certifiactes automatic.

What do I need know to deploy it in my cluster?

Given your cluster is already made of an LDAP server, a Redis cluster, a Mongo cluster and a SMTP server, you'll only need to install the ingress-controller and Authelia whose configurations are respectively in ingress-controller and authelia directories.

I'm already using ingress-nginx

If you're already using ingress-nginx as your ingress controller, the only thing you'll need to change is the nginx template used by the controller to make it compatible with Authelia. The template is located in ingress-controller/configs/nginx.tmpl. Make it a configmap and pass it to your controller arguments.

Questions

If you have questions about the implementation, please post them on