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Full development environment

Backend​

To create a local development setup for authentik, you need the following:

Requirements​

  • Python 3.10
  • poetry, which is used to manage dependencies, and can be installed with pip install poetry
  • Go 1.18
  • PostgreSQL (any recent version will do)
  • Redis (any recent version will do)

For PostgreSQL and Redis, you can use the docker-compose file in scripts/. You can also use a native install, if you prefer.

Setup​

poetry shell # Creates a python virtualenv, and activates it in a new shell
poetry install # Install all required dependencies, including development dependencies

To configure authentik to use the local databases, create a file in the authentik directory called local.env.yml, with the following contents

debug: true
postgresql:
    user: postgres

log_level: debug
secret_key: "A long key you can generate with `pwgen 40 1` for example"

To apply database migrations, run make migrate. This is needed after the initial setup, and whenever you fetch new source from upstream.

Afterwards, you can start authentik by running make run. authentik is now accessible under localhost:9000.

Generally speaking, authentik is a Django application, ran by gunicorn, proxied by a Go application. The Go application serves static files.

Most functions and classes have type-hints and docstrings, so it is recommended to install a Python Type-checking Extension in your IDE to navigate around the code.

Before committing code, run make lint to ensure your code is formatted well. This also requires pyright@1.1.136, which can be installed with npm.

Run make gen to generate an updated OpenAPI document for any changes you made.

Frontend​

By default, no compiled bundle of the frontend is included. To build the UI, you need Node 14 or newer.

To build the UI, run these commands:

cd web/
npm i
npm run build

If you want to make changes to the UI, run npm run watch instead.

To ensure the code is formatted well, run npx eslint . --fix and npm run lit-analyse.