SWAG

SWAG is a reverse proxy supported by Authelia. It’s an NGINX proxy container with bundled configurations to make your life easier.

Important: When using these guides, it’s important to recognize that we cannot provide a guide for every possible method of deploying a proxy. These guides show a suggested setup only, and you need to understand the proxy configuration and customize it to your needs. To-that-end, we include links to the official proxy documentation throughout this documentation and in the See Also section.

Introduction#

As SWAG is a NGINX proxy with curated configurations, integration of Authelia with SWAG is very easy and you only need to enabled two includes.

Note: All paths in this guide are the locations inside the container. You will have to either edit the files within the container or adapt the path to the path you have mounted the relevant container path to.

Get started#

It’s strongly recommended that users setting up Authelia for the first time take a look at our Get started guide. This takes you through various steps which are essential to bootstrapping Authelia.

Requirements#

SWAG supports the required NGINX requirements for Authelia out-of-the-box.

Trusted Proxies#

Important: You should read the Forwarded Headers section and this section as part of any proxy configuration. Especially if you have never read it before.

To configure trusted proxies for SWAG see the NGINX section on Trusted Proxies. Adapting this to SWAG is beyond the scope of this documentation.

Assumptions and Adaptation#

This guide makes a few assumptions. These assumptions may require adaptation in more advanced and complex scenarios. We can not reasonably have examples for every advanced configuration option that exists. The following are the assumptions we make:

• You have followed the Get Started guide and configured
• Deployment Scenario:
  • Single Host
  • Authelia is deployed as a Container with the container name authelia on port 9091
  • Proxy is deployed as a Container on a network shared with Authelia
• The above assumption means that Authelia should be accessible to the proxy on http://authelia:9091 and as such:
  • You will have to adapt all instances of the above URL to be https:// if Authelia configuration has a TLS key and certificate defined
  • You will have to adapt all instances of authelia in the URL if:
    • You’re using a different container name
    • You deployed the proxy to a different location
  • You will have to adapt all instances of 9091 in the URL if:
    • You have adjusted the default port in the configuration
  • You will have to adapt the entire URL if:
    • Authelia is on a different host to the proxy
• All services are part of the example.com domain:
  • This domain and the subdomains will have to be adapted in all examples to match your specific domains unless you’re just testing or you want to use that specific domain

Docker Compose#

The following docker compose example has various applications suitable for setting up an example environment.

It uses the nginx image from [linuxserver.io] which includes all of the required modules including the http_set_misc module.

It also includes the nginx-proxy-confs mod where they have several configuration examples in the /config/nginx/proxy-confs directory. This can be omitted if desired.

If you’re looking for a more complete solution [linuxserver.io] also have an nginx container called SWAG which includes ACME and various other useful utilities.

---
networks:
  net:
    driver: 'bridge'

services:
  swag:
    container_name: 'swag'
    image: 'lscr.io/linuxserver/swag'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - '${PWD}/data/swag:/config'
      ## Uncomment the line below if you want to use the Authelia configuration snippets.
      #- '${PWD}/data/nginx/snippets:/snippets'
    environment:
      PUID: '1000'
      PGID: '1000'
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
      URL: 'example.com'
      SUBDOMAINS: 'www,whoami,auth,organizr'
      VALIDATION: 'http'
      CERTPROVIDER: 'cloudflare'
      ONLY_SUBDOMAINS: 'false'
      STAGING: 'true'
    cap_add:
      - 'NET_ADMIN'
  authelia:
    container_name: 'authelia'
    image: 'authelia/authelia'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    expose:
      - 9091
    volumes:
      - '${PWD}/data/authelia/config:/config'
    environment:
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
  organizr:
    container_name: 'organizr'
    image: 'organizr/organizr'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    expose:
      - 80
    volumes:
      - '${PWD}/data/organizr/config:/config'
    environment:
      PUID: '1000'
      PGID: '1000'
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
  whoami:
    container_name: 'whoami'
    image: 'docker.io/traefik/whoami'
    restart: 'unless-stopped'
    networks:
      net:
        aliases: []
    expose:
      - 80
    environment:
      TZ: 'Australia/Melbourne'
...

Configuration Options#

There are two configuration options for SWAG. The recommended option is Adjusting the Default Configuration

Option 1: Adjusting the Default Configuration#

The first option requires some minor adjustments to be made and is the recommended option.

Adjust authelia-server.conf#

The generated authelia-server.conf includes the proxy_pass http://$upstream_authelia:9091; directive in two location blocks, we recommend adjusting these locations so they include the part of the location match after the /authelia part for example in the location = /authelia/api/verify set the directive to proxy_pass http://$upstream_authelia:9091/api/verify; and the location = /authelia/api/authz/auth-request set the directive to proxy_pass http://$upstream_authelia:9091/api/authz/auth-request;. See the below example.

# location for authelia 4.37 and below auth requests
location = /authelia/api/verify {
    internal;

    include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
    include /config/nginx/resolver.conf;
    set $upstream_authelia authelia;
    proxy_pass http://$upstream_authelia:9091/api/verify;

    ## Include the Set-Cookie header if present
    auth_request_set $set_cookie $upstream_http_set_cookie;
    add_header Set-Cookie $set_cookie;

    proxy_pass_request_body off;
    proxy_set_header Content-Length "";
}

# location for authelia 4.38 and above auth requests
location = /authelia/api/authz/auth-request {
    internal;

    include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
    include /config/nginx/resolver.conf;
    set $upstream_authelia authelia;
    proxy_pass http://$upstream_authelia:9091/api/authz/auth-request;

    ## Include the Set-Cookie header if present
    auth_request_set $set_cookie $upstream_http_set_cookie;
    add_header Set-Cookie $set_cookie;

    proxy_pass_request_body off;
    proxy_set_header Content-Length "";
}

Configure Authelia Site Configuration#

1. In the /config/nginx/site-confs/ directory copy authelia.subdomain.conf.sample to authelia.subdomain.conf.
2. Edit authelia.subdomain.conf and adjust server_name authelia.*; to be server_name auth.*;.

Configure Organizr Site Configuration#

We’re using Organizr as an example application for this example.

1. In the /config/nginx/site-confs/ directory copy organizr.subdomain.conf.sample to organizr.subdomain.conf.
2. Edit organizr.subdomain.conf and remove the leading # (i.e. uncomment) the
3. #include /config/nginx/authelia-server.conf; line and the #include /config/nginx/authelia-location.conf; line.

Restart the Container#

Once these changes have occurred you can restart SWAG and Organizr and Authelia should be configured correctly.

Option 2: Using the Authelia Supplementary Configuration Snippets#

See standard NGINX guide (which can be used with SWAG) and run Authelia as its own subdomain.

Prerequisite Steps#

In the SWAG /config mount which is mounted to ${PWD}/data/swag in our example:

1. Create a folder named snippets/authelia:
   • The mkdir -p ${PWD}/data/swag/nginx/snippets/authelia command should achieve this on Linux.
2. Create the ${PWD}/data/swag/nginx/snippets/authelia/location.conf file which can be found here.
3. Create the ${PWD}/data/swag/nginx/snippets/authelia/authrequest.conf file which can be found here.
   • Ensure you adjust the line error_page 401 =302 https://auth.example.com/?rd=$target_url; replacing https://auth.example.com/ with your external Authelia URL.

Protected Application#

In the server configuration for the application you want to protect:

1. Edit the /config/nginx/proxy-confs/ file for the application you wish to protect.
2. Under the #include /config/nginx/authelia-server.conf; line which should be within the server block but not inside any location blocks add the following line: include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/location.conf;.
3. Under the #include /config/nginx/authelia-location.conf; line which should be within the applications location block add the following line include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/authrequest.conf;.

Example#

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;

    server_name whoami.*;

    include /config/nginx/ssl.conf;

    client_max_body_size 0;

    # Authelia: Step 1.
    #include /config/nginx/authelia-server.conf;
    include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/location.conf;

    location / {
        # Authelia: Step 2.
        #include /config/nginx/authelia-location.conf;
        include /config/nginx/snippets/authelia/authrequest.conf;

        include /config/nginx/proxy.conf;
        resolver 127.0.0.11 valid=30s;
        set $upstream_app whoami;
        set $upstream_port 80;
        set $upstream_proto http;
        proxy_pass $upstream_proto://$upstream_app:$upstream_port;
    }
}

See Also#

• Authelia NGINX Integration Documentation
• LinuxServer.io Setting Up Authelia With SWAG Documentation / Blog Post
• NGINX ngx_http_auth_request_module Module Documentation
• Forwarded Headers