Working with policies

For an overview of policies, refer to our documentation on Policies.

authentik provides several standard policy types, which can be configured for your specific needs. We also document several useful expression policies.

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You can add expressions to our standard policies to further customize them.

To learn more, see the bindings and how to bind policy bindings to a new application when the application is created documentation (for example, to configure application-specific access).

Create a policy

To create a new policy, either a pre-configured one or an expression policy, follow these steps:

1. Log in to authentik as an administrator and open the authentik Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Customization > Policies.
3. Click Create, and select the type of policy. Here you select whether you want to create a custom expression policy, or a standard, out-of-the box one.
4. Define the policy and click Finish.

Bind a policy to a flow or stage

After creating the policy, you can bind it to either a flow or to a stage.

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Bindings are instantiated objects themselves, and conceptually can be considered as the "connector" between the policy and the stage or flow. This is why you might read about "binding a binding", because technically, a binding is "spliced" into another binding, in order to intercept and enforce the criteria defined in the policy. To learn more refer to our Bindings documentation.

Bind a policy to a flow

These bindings control which users can access a flow.

1. Log in as an admin to authentik, and open the Admin interface.
2. In the Admin interface, navigate to Flows and Stages > Flows.
3. In the list of flows, click on the name of the flow to which you want to bind a policy.
4. Click on the Policy/Group/User Bindings tab at the top of the page.
5. Here, you can decide if you want to create a new policy and bind it to the flow (Create and bind Policy), or if you want to select an existing policy and bind it to the flow (Bind existing policy/group/user).

Bind a policy to a stage

These bindings control which stages are applied to a flow.

1. Log in to authentik as an administrator and open the authentik Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Flows and Stages > Stages.
3. In the list of stages, click on the name of the stage to which you want to bind a policy.
4. Click on the Stage Bindings tab at the top of the page.
5. Click the arrow (>) beside the name of the stage to which you want to bind a policy. The details for that stage displays.
6. Here, you can decide if you want to create a new policy and bind it to the stage (Create and bind Policy), or if you want to select an existing policy and bind it to the stage (Bind existing policy/group/user).