New to Authentik - Challenges with getting my first application working


!Selfhosted - I'm new to #Authentik - I've just spun up a test instance and tried to connect my first application (#Postiz) but I'm kind of stuck.

I've installed both Postiz and Authentik using Docker Compose - as provided by the relevant apps.

As far as #Authentik goes it looks like its approving authentication requests (its showing successes in the GUI) but the application just returns to the login screen without progressing.

One thing that I found was that within the configuration of the Application and Provider one URL provided by Authentik is the /application/o/postiz/.well-known/openid-configuration which lists several URLs used by the application - one is /application/o/authorize/ but unlike all the others this returns a 404 error when I try to load it via the browser.

I am struggling to work out if - this URL should 404 should occur and also how to diagnose what the problem is.

I've popped messages in their relevant Discord forums but any ideas or input would be greatly appreciated - I'm figuring getting Authentik is going to be key to getting other applications going.

in reply to abeorch

Pocket-id also supports ldap sync pocket-id.org/docs/configurati…

I tried Authentik then moved to Authelia and then to pocket-id. I found the first two unnecessarily complicated for selfhosting unless you want to specifically learn them.

Setting up https is quite straightforward, especially with caddy.

in reply to abeorch

I moved away from authentik for void-auth: github.com/voidauth/voidauth

Life is so much better...

in reply to Starfighter

I tried literally every mature option and they all were ridiculously complicated or just straight didn’t work for me. Voidauth just works. One container. Does everything you need to offer SSO for your users, and secures apps that don’t use SSO just as easily with proxyauth.
in reply to abeorch

I have self hosted for years using Authentik and have 50 + services. Postiz has been one of the most challenging to spin up and maintain. The documentation is not up to date, the software is constantly changing and I had to tweak lots to get it to work. Even now, it seems to crash after a few days and haven't had the chance to investigate. All these posts I set up didn't go through and now if I turn it back on, it'll release them all in one go before I can get in to stop it, or have to revert to a fresh install...

The vast majority of services and not like this so don't get disheartened! Try some other ones first them come back to this when more experienced. I recommend Bento PDF, ConvertX, outline wiki, vikunja and immich (if you have the storage space).

At first, try to stick to software on Authentik's guides (integrations.goauthentik.io/). Once you do a few OIDC and forward proxy services you'll get the hang of it.

When I get a chance I'll share my docker compose SSO settings and authentik redirect uri that worked for me with the caveat that the software crashes for some reason.

in reply to brewery

Oh cheers. Yeah I think I need to test setting up another app to confirm whether its Authentik or Postiz. The other app I am looking at is an open source core banking system so I think I'll leave that one for a while and as you suggest try something more straight forward.

I'm keen to get Postiz working because I belong to a sailing club and its a time vacuum posting updates all over the place.

I'm interested do you you anything for social listening - I'd like to pull together a few social feeds from Twitter, Instal, Facebook and provide them to the few of us that are working on keeping the club's profile up.

Selfhosted reshared this.

in reply to abeorch

So an update. It turns out that all the issues were actually to do with Postiz rather than Authentic. - I tried installing a few other apps and linking them to Authentik but I ran into a few issues. Then I took Postiz and tried turning off the Atuthentik authentication and then just getting it to work with native user accounts. This initially didn't work - it turned out that there were a few issues.

1. The startup procedure for Poztiz actually left the backend API service not running properly. I had to run the docker compose, get all the other services running and then stop the postiz container specifically wait a bit more and then restart just that container. That got the API service running.

2. Because I was just running it internally I didn't have SSL certificates configured and was just using http - consequently I had to introduce NOT_SECURED: "true" into the environment section of the Postiz service in the compose file and then repeat the process above. This resolved a silent error in my browser where cookies used to manage the authenticated browser session were discarded because I wasn't using SSL.

So success at least getting Postiz running. I am now going to step back, reconfigure it for Authentic retry.

I am going to guess that these issues might be relevant if you are running Postiz behind a reverse proxy (I'm not sure if this is being done with the docker compose set-up). I possibly also need to look at how much memory and CPU I have on my test VM.

I've posted similar details in Postiz Discord. If anyone else is using #Postiz and would like to exchange notes - please do drop me a mention. Always good to have other people to talk to about these things and share notes.

Selfhosted reshared this.