this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
16 points (94.4% liked)

Selfhosted

49871 readers
1374 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
16
Deploy Authentik to already working services and accounts. (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Daaric@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi,

TLDR: Does anyone have an experience with setting Authentik to already existing user accounts, most importantly in Immich?

I am currently thinking (and studying how to) about deploying Authentik and using it as SSO for the stuff I host. The main reason is to rise the WAF and make them more accessible and appealing for perhaps other family members.

I already see some roadblocks ahead and am trying to understand, how to go over them in a smooth and safe way.

For most of the services, there shouldn't be much risk (loosing watch history in jellyfin might be unfortunate but not mission critical).

Though, I'm running Immich with three users, each with several years of photos.. And here I'm afraid of how to link these already existing photos to the new accounts introduced by Authentik.

The other service is Nextcloud, but I'm the only one using it now and I could prepare and move the data, contacts and so on, though calendars might be PITA...

If anybody have some experience with it, I'd be so grateful.

I run most of my stuff in docker containers on an Unraid server at home, behind a hell of a cgnat and a tiny VPS where my caddy proxy and synapse HS live, and where I'd like to set up the Authentik as well.

top 6 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] nickiam2@aussie.zone 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I implemented authentik for my immich server just last week and I can confirm that Immich will merge the accounts as long as they have the same email address. My other services I had to configure to use email matching. Paperless-ngx needed an environment variable added to allow it, and Grafana I didn't even have a user created for myself, just used the default admin account.

Jellyfin doesn't support OIDC without a 3rd party plugin, so I haven't set that one up yet. I also don't use nextcloud, so can't comment on that.

[–] antsu@lemmy.wtf 2 points 2 days ago

Your top priority should be "Are my backups good? / Can I trivially roll back any breaking changes?" If an account oopsie can permanently compromise your users' photos, then you have bigger problems to worry about.

But assuming your backups are good, there isn't much to worry about. I recommend you don't take my word for it and thoroughly read the documentation of each of the services you want to put behind Authentik, but in general, when a service is configured to use SSO, if a user with the same ID already exists on the target service, they are simply merged. The most common ID for this is the email associated with that user on both Authentik and the service. Worst case, if the ID doesn't match, you either get an error saying the user is invalid or you get a new user created on the target service.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Yes, I setup authentik and all my services already had accounts. Immich and next cloud included.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago

I synced immich to authentik post deployment no issue, but I believe my email matched. I don't recall if I had to configure my user account ontop of the oauth settings or not, I believe it was smart enough to link the same email to the account.

If you are using a VM style deployment you could run a snapshot of the immich server ahead of time then just rollback if it fails. That's what I do for all services when changing stuff.

[–] Vetinari@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I don't have immich but nextcloud is no problem. You just add a field to each user in authentik and it maps to the existing user.

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 3 days ago

I dont think Immich supports turning a normal account into an sso account, though it may be possible with manual database editing.