Environment

Authelia and its development workflow can be tested with Docker and Docker Compose on Linux.

Prerequisites#

In order to build and contribute to Authelia, you need to make sure the following are installed in your environment:

• General:
  • git
  • bash
  • A modern Linux distribution, Windows and macOS are not officially supported.
• Backend Development:
  • go:
    • Minimum is v1.24.3.
    • The toolchain version noted in go.mod is the officially supported version.
    • We will not officially support old versions of go generally without a very good reason.
  • gcc
  • gomock
• Frontend Development:
  • Node.js (v22.15.0 or greater).
  • pnpm (v10.10.0 or greater).
• Integration Suites:
  • Docker (v28.1.1 or greater).
  • Docker Compose (v2.36.0 or greater)
  • chromium
  • delve

These additional tools are recommended:

• golangci-lint
• goimports-reviser
• yamllint
• VSCodium or GoLand

Certificate#

Authelia utilizes a self-signed Root CA certificate for the development environment. This allows us to sign elements of the CI process uniformly and only trust a single additional Root CA Certificate. The private key for this certificate is maintained by the Core Team so if you need an additional certificate signed for this purpose please reach out to them.

While developing for Authelia you may also want to trust this Root CA. It is critical that you are aware of what this means if you decide to do so.

1. It will allow us to generate trusted certificates for machines this is installed on.
2. If compromised there is no formal revocation process at this time as we are not a certified CA.
3. Trusting Root CA’s is not necessary for the development process it only makes it smoother.
4. Trusting additional Root CA’s for prolonged periods is not generally a good idea.

If you’d still like to trust the Root CA Certificate it’s located (encoded as a PEM) in the main git repository at internal/suites/common/pki/ca/ca.public.crt.

Context#

There is a development context that can be loaded using bootstrap.sh. All that you need to do is satisfy the prerequisites and run the below command (or an equivalent of):

source bootstrap.sh

This context gives you access to the following commands:

• authelia-scripts - used to perform various development focused tasks such as building the binary, building a docker image, setting up integration suites, or performing tests
• authelia-gen - used to perform code generation, we recommend running this command just before you commit whenever you make changes
• authelia-suites - used to manage suites, generally we recommend using authelia-scripts instead

Frequently Asked Questions#

Do you support development under Windows or macOS?#

At the present time this is not officially supported. Some of the maintainers utilize Windows and/or macOS however running suites under Windows or macOS is not something that is currently possible to do easily. As such we recommend utilizing Linux.

Why can’t I use old versions of docker and docker compose?#

We have geared all of our examples and suites based on modern versions of these products. If you decide to use an older version then you’re on your own.

How can I run the suite test applications when they’re hosted on arbitrary domains?#

The authelia-scripts bootstrap subcommand handles this for you and creates the relevant hosts entries. This is automatically executed when using bootstrap.sh.