There’s no single tutorial that I had followed. Just read several documentation.
Let me try and briefly describe my setup.
Apologies that I need to break some links. Can’t put more that 2 links because I’m “too new” here.
I have all the applications running as Docker containers. Apologies that I won’t cover the NPM and Authelia setup here. They’re websites have pretty good guides. NPM and Authelia are on one server and Grist on another but shouldn’t matter here.
- Nginx Proxy Manager / nginxproxymanager(dot)com – as reverse proxy
- Authelia / www.authelia(dot)com - for authentication
- Grist of course
Grist Setup
I started with setting up Grist as another Docker container without the Authelia integration first, but making sure that I used the same email address as the account that I used for Authelia.
Setup a proxy host in NPM to point to the Grist server - example grist.mydomain.tld.
Test that the url works. Sign-out of Grist.
docker-compose.yml
version: '3.3'
services:
grist:
ports:
- '8484:8484'
volumes:
- ./persist:/persist
image: gristlabs/grist
container_name: grist
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
- APP_DOC_URL=https://grist.mydomain.tld
- APP_HOME_URL=https://grist.mydomain.tld
- GRIST_SINGLE_ORG=orgname
- GRIST_ORG_IN_PATH=true
Integrating Authelia on NPM
I followed the Authelia guide to set it up on nginx with a slight modifications.
So I created these 3 files as described on the guide. These are saved on the data
folder mounted on the NPM container. So within the container, they can be found on /data/authelia/
.
authelia.conf - with modifications
set $upstream_authelia http://authelia:9091/api/verify;
# Virtual endpoint created by nginx to forward auth requests.
# MOD: next line is commented out for NPM purposes
# location /authelia {
internal;
proxy_pass_request_body off;
proxy_pass $upstream_authelia;
proxy_set_header Content-Length "";
# Timeout if the real server is dead
proxy_next_upstream error timeout invalid_header http_500 http_502 http_503;
# [REQUIRED] Needed by Authelia to check authorizations of the resource.
# Provide either X-Original-URL and X-Forwarded-Proto or
# X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Forwarded-Host and X-Forwarded-Uri or both.
# Those headers will be used by Authelia to deduce the target url of the user.
# Basic Proxy Config
client_body_buffer_size 128k;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Original-URL $scheme://$http_host$request_uri;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Method $request_method;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Uri $request_uri;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Ssl on;
proxy_redirect http:// $scheme://;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection "";
proxy_cache_bypass $cookie_session;
proxy_no_cache $cookie_session;
proxy_buffers 4 32k;
# Advanced Proxy Config
send_timeout 5m;
proxy_read_timeout 240;
proxy_send_timeout 240;
proxy_connect_timeout 240;
# MOD: next line is commented out for NPM purposes
#}
auth.conf
# Basic Authelia Config
# Send a subsequent request to Authelia to verify if the user is authenticated
# and has the right permissions to access the resource.
auth_request /authelia;
# Set the `target_url` variable based on the request. It will be used to build the portal
# URL with the correct redirection parameter.
auth_request_set $target_url $scheme://$http_host$request_uri;
# Set the X-Forwarded-User and X-Forwarded-Groups with the headers
# returned by Authelia for the backends which can consume them.
# This is not safe, as the backend must make sure that they come from the
# proxy. In the future, it's gonna be safe to just use OAuth.
auth_request_set $user $upstream_http_remote_user;
auth_request_set $groups $upstream_http_remote_groups;
auth_request_set $name $upstream_http_remote_name;
auth_request_set $email $upstream_http_remote_email;
proxy_set_header Remote-User $user;
proxy_set_header Remote-Groups $groups;
proxy_set_header Remote-Name $name;
proxy_set_header Remote-Email $email;
# If Authelia returns 401, then nginx redirects the user to the login portal.
# If it returns 200, then the request pass through to the backend.
# For other type of errors, nginx will handle them as usual.
error_page 401 =302 https://auth.mydomain.tld/?rd=$target_url;
proxy.conf
client_body_buffer_size 128k;
#Timeout if the real server is dead
proxy_next_upstream error timeout invalid_header http_500 http_502 http_503;
# Advanced Proxy Config
send_timeout 5m;
proxy_read_timeout 360;
proxy_send_timeout 360;
proxy_connect_timeout 360;
# Basic Proxy Config
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Uri $request_uri;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Ssl on;
proxy_redirect http:// $scheme://;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection "";
proxy_cache_bypass $cookie_session;
proxy_no_cache $cookie_session;
proxy_buffers 64 256k;
# If behind reverse proxy, forwards the correct IP
set_real_ip_from 10.0.0.0/8;
set_real_ip_from 172.16.0.0/12;
set_real_ip_from 192.168.0.0/16;
set_real_ip_from fc00::/7;
real_ip_header X-Forwarded-For;
real_ip_recursive on;
Now, within NPM, modify the proxy host that you initially setup for Grist and add this on the Advanced tab.
edit: fixed for the logout issue
Advanced tab
# this line solved the logout issue!
rewrite ^/signed-out$ https://auth.mydomain.tld/logout?rd=https://grist.mydomain.tld redirect;
location /authelia {
include /data/authelia/authelia.conf;
}
location / {
# pass
set $upstream_grist http://ip.address.of.grist:8484;
proxy_pass $upstream_grist;
# websockets support
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
# authelia
include /data/authelia/auth.conf;
include /data/authelia/proxy.conf;
}
Now, browse to your Grist url - grist.mydomain.tld and it should redirect to Authelia. Grist will still prompt you to sign-in with your Grist account.
Integrate Authelia users Grist users
According to the Grist Readme, there is this option.
GRIST_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER
header which will be set by a (reverse) proxy webserver with an authorized users’ email. This can be used as an alternative to a SAML service.
Authelia uses Remote-Email
as the header for the email (see auth.conf file).
So I added the variable to my docker-compose.yml
file and re-created the container.
environment:
- GRIST_PROXY_AUTH_HEADER=Remote-Email
- APP_DOC_URL=https://grist.mydomain.tld
...
Once it started up, it recognized the Authelia user and logged in immediately.
There you go. It’s far from a brief description but I hope it helps.