Traefik forward-auth middleware fronting homelab services with Authentik SSO Traefik forward-auth middleware fronting homelab services with Authentik SSO

Every homelab service behind one login: Traefik forward-auth with Authentik

TL;DR Every service I run — ComfyUI, Grafana, Vault, even the ancient app on a Mac across the network — lives behind a Traefik forward-auth middleware that hands off to Authentik. No per-service login page. One Authentik login shared across everything. The magic is a two-route IngressRoute pattern: a protected route with the middleware + an unprotected callback route for the OAuth flow itself. Adding a new service to the cluster takes five lines of YAML. Wiring a non-Kubernetes backend — like the Mac that runs ComfyUI and Ollama — takes a service-with-manual-endpoints proxy. ...

June 7, 2026 · 7 min · zolty
Vault HA cluster fronted by Authentik with KMS auto-unseal Vault HA cluster fronted by Authentik with KMS auto-unseal

HashiCorp Vault behind Authentik — secrets that survive an auditor

TL;DR I had Authentik handling human auth and kubeseal handling cluster secrets, which left a gap: anything that needed a real secret at runtime — API tokens, database passwords, Bedrock keys — was one kubectl get secret away from being readable in plaintext. I deployed HashiCorp Vault as a 3-node HA cluster on k3s, auto-unsealed via AWS KMS, with Authentik OIDC for human SSO and the Kubernetes auth method for workloads. Apps get their secrets injected by a sidecar; no app code touches a k8s Secret object anymore. The migration took a weekend and removed an entire category of “what if this got read” worry I’d been ignoring. ...

May 17, 2026 · 8 min · zolty
Authentik identity platform Authentik identity platform

Planning Authentik: Centralized Identity for a Homelab

TL;DR I am deploying Authentik as a centralized identity provider for my k3s cluster. It replaces the current OAuth2 Proxy setup with proper SSO, federates Google as a social login source, and introduces group-based RBAC (admins, writers, readers) across all services. The migration is phased – public services first via Traefik forwardAuth, then internal services via native OIDC, then proxy-protected apps that have no OIDC support. OAuth2 Proxy stays in git for instant rollback. This post covers the architecture, the user model, the edge security design, and the gotchas I expect to hit. ...

March 27, 2026 · 7 min · zolty

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