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This is a hugely requested feature for many years and a huge hole in my entire self hosted ecosystem. Every self-hosted app I have connects to my Authentik system for user management… Except home assistant. Arguably one of the apps I need it for the most for the whole family to use with their accounts.

Devs have been resistant for some reason.

There is now a community integratation that allows user management for HA to be via any openID backend (authentik, keycloak etc).

I’ve been running it for a few days and it works perfectly. Very easy to setup if you already have a working authentik setup and know how to use it with other apps like immich.

If i created a service I would go in the opposit direction. Only offer SSO and no other option.

You loose quite a bit of complexity that way.

There are auth libraries that you can just plug into your app so you don’t even have to worry about that part yourself and just focus on the app

https://authjs.dev/getting-started

By default, the Credentials provider does not persist data in the database. However, you can still create and save any data in your database, you just have to provide the necessary logic, eg. to encrypt passwords, add rate-limiting, add password reset functionality, etc.

That is exactly the complexity I wouldn’t want. With just SSO it is enough to send a redirect URL to the browser and on the callback set a cookie. No js needed. If your service gets compromised and someone leeks the credentials, just log everyone out.

I would hate it if google and apple would be the sole identity providers. If they lock me out, I’m lost. That’s what a majority of people do. And services have the power to choose the identity provider. Most offer only that and that’s horrible.

I should have been more clear.

I meant for self hosting.

Though realistically, even if the service is provided for the public, you could just use an instance of keycloak or something similar with open registration. That’s what an association I’m close to is doing already.

I see you. There are spillover effects. If we don’t use and support passwords, others wont either.

It’s not even that my government provides the identity but a foreign, autocratic, power hungry company

Problem is requiring a browser if it’s not primarily a web interface. Even if initial setup is web-based, a lot of times background processes exist that don’t traverse the internet, especially in higher security situations, so exposing those components to the internet just to get external credentials is not worth it, so then an additional proxying component is required. Anyway, the idea is that it can add a significant amount of complexity if it’s something more complex than a simple, single component web application.

With keycloak you can have a single local password to all your selfhosted apps: you sign in to keycloak, then you sso into everything else from there. I’m building that out on my homelab right now, and it’s working fine.

Haven’t touched HA yet but I run FreeIPA, is there an LDAP option or will I have to get an open I’d solution go sit in front of it?

I’ve been using this for several months, it works very well with Pocket ID. :)

Everything still needs to be set in configuration.yaml. right? I see nothing that inidcates that it’s possible to set up from the UI yet.

Do you know of how it compares to the option that’s been around for a while?
https://github.com/christiaangoossens/hass-oidc-auth

I see they say “seamless”; the extant one requires a different landing page and it doesn’t remember logged in browser well. So on the face of it, this sounds better.

But the one linked has had many more eyes and is made by the person who made a big stink on the forums https://community.home-assistant.io/t/open-letter-for-improving-home-assistants-authentication-system-oidc-sso/494223

For the ease teased, I’ll prob check it out though

I’ve not looked for an LDAP solution but stuff like this is why i went with authentik over other solutions. Because authentik has LDAP built in, i can use this when needed (jellyfin) but then use openid for other apps (which us superior in almost every way for home lab use)

Yes its config file only, but if you get the File editor app, it’s quite easy to just copy and paste a few lines into the editor.

(which us superior in almost every way for home lab use)

In which ways? Not disagreeing just a huge fan of the ability to handle Linux users, groups and policy like hbac, ssh keys, and sudoer rules.

Honestly if I could get ansible to dynamically create inventories from host groups I’d be set.

Does authentik handle is level auth for Linux machines?

For webapp stuff for sure, but when you want to login as the same user with the same perms across all your VMS and baremetal servers at the os, it’s nice.

I use virtualization over containerization because i have the hardware resource so I might as well take advantage of improved isolation and security VMS provide. Plus I use Linux on my desktop/laptop, and have a separate dedicated storage host.

Its nice to have everything managed by one service with global accounts and permissions.

Looking at authentik it seems to provide some but not all of that. Def something to keep an eye on if freeipa decides to stop being so free.

Authentik handles SSO for all my apps like immich, linkwarden, owncloud etc. Jellyfin uses LDAP via authentik but isn’t sso.

Other than me, no one else mounts samba shares directly. All personal files are synced to server and other devices with owncloud (OCIS).

Yeah, and there are other apps that do the same, I’m using voidauth myself but use keycloak at work for our internal sso

You can self host the authentication outside of the Internet.

Problem is that the user has to be presented that webpage anf the results have to make their way back to teach component. If you have a bunch of microservices that aren’t user facing (whether internet or private network) then how do those services get the user data to do their things. Monolithic server applications are bad practice outside of extremely simple web apps if you want something scalable. So you still need a database of local users that the services can share privately. That means a built-in user database that is just linked to the SSO user by the service that is user facing. Otherwise, all micro-services have to authenticate separately with the user once every time the token expires. Which means lots of browser sessions somehow getting from a micro-service with no web front end to the user.

Anyway, just an example, but when a local user database is required anyway, then SSO is always addition development work and exerts possibly significant limitations on the application architecture. This is why it’s not commonly implemented at first. There needs to be better protocols that are open source and well tested. OIDC is my current favorite in many cases, but it has limitations like logging out or switching between users on the same browser is a pain. Most proprietary apps use proprietary solutions because of the limitations and they feel (often incorrectly) like it’s obfuscated enough to not be susceptible to attacks despite the simplicity. Doing SSO right is hard, so having to implement something from scratch isn’t feasible and when done is usually vulnerable.