Frontend development environment

If you're focusing solely on frontend development, you can create a minimal development environment using Docker and Node.js. This setup allows you to make and preview changes to the frontend in real-time, without needing to interact with the backend.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (22 or later)
• Docker (Latest Community Edition or Docker Desktop)
• Docker Compose (Compose v2)
• Make (3 or later)

info

Depending on platform, some native dependencies might be required. On macOS, run brew install node@22, and for Docker brew install --cask docker

Instructions

1. Clone the Git repo to your development machine and navigate to the authentik directory.

   git clone https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik
   cd authentik
   Beta images

   By default, authentik will use the latest stable Docker images. You can opt into using beta images during development by creating a .env file in the root of the repository with the following variables:

   AUTHENTIK_IMAGE=ghcr.io/goauthentik/dev-server
   AUTHENTIK_TAG=gh-next
   AUTHENTIK_OUTPOSTS__CONTAINER_IMAGE_BASE=ghcr.io/goauthentik/dev-%(type)s:gh-next
   AUTHENTIK_LOG_LEVEL=debug

2. From the cloned repository, follow the Docker Compose installation instructions.

3. Create a Docker Compose override to mount the local configuration file (local.env.yml) and ESBuild's output directory (web).

   docker-compose.override.yml

   services:
       server:
           volumes:
               - ./web:/web
               - ./local.env.yml:/local.env.yml

   By creating this file in the root of the repository, Docker will automatically mount the web files generated by the build process. The local.env.yml mount is optional, but allows you to override the default configuration.

4. From the cloned repository root, install the front-end dependencies using NPM.

   cd web
   npm ci

5. From the cloned repository root, run the front-end build script.

   make web-watch

6. In a new terminal, navigate to the cloned repository root and start the backend containers with Docker Compose.

   docker compose up

You can now access authentik on http://localhost:9000 (or https://localhost:9443).

You might also want to complete the initial setup under /if/flow/initial-setup/.