Forward auth

Defguard supports forward auth integration with popular reverse proxies (tested with traefik and caddy). This allows you to use Defguard to secure services which don't provide their own authorization or OAuth integration.

In order for forward auth to work the services you are trying to protect must be available at URLs within the same base domain as your Defguard instance.

For example if you are serving your Defguard UI at id.yourdomain.com, then your services must use other subdomains of yourdomain.com, e.g. app1.yourdomain.com, `service.yourdomain.com` etc.

Additionally you have to update your Defguard config to set the cookies domain to yourdomain.com.

Example configurations

For brevity, all of the examples below assume you are hosting your Defguard instance at defguard.yourdomain.com.

We'll use a basic whoami container as an example service, which will be available at whoami.yourdomain.com.

Traefik

docker-compose.yml

version: "3"

services:
  traefik:
    image: traefik:v2.9
    command: --api.insecure=true --providers.docker
    ports:
      - "80:80" # HTTP port
      - "8080:8080" # Web UI port
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
  whoami:
    image: traefik/whoami
    labels:
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.rule=Host(`whoami.yourdomain.com`)"
      - "traefik.http.middlewares.defguardauth.forwardauth.address=http://defguard.yourdomain.com/api/v1/forward_auth"
      - "traefik.http.routers.whoami.middlewares=defguardauth"

Caddy

Caddyfile

# Disable HTTPS for this example (WARNING: Do not use in production)
{
    auto_https off
    https_port 80
}

whoami.yourdomain.com {
    forward_auth defguard.yourdomain.com {
      uri /api/v1/forward_auth
    }
    reverse_proxy whoami:80
}

docker-compose.yml

version: "3"

services:
  caddy:
    image: caddy:2.6.4-alpine
    ports:
      - "80:80" # HTTP port
    volumes:
      - ./Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile
  whoami:
    image: traefik/whoami