Authelia

Deploying test hosts for Authelia MFA authentication

Jon Eaton

Jun 1, 2024 • 2 min read

This started as a single page but became too large to manage, I've now split it up into these sections.

Following on from part one we now need to deploy two separate hosts to test Authelia MFA. If you already have a web site or application then you may not need to do this. I have chosen to included it, so all steps are covered from deploying / configuring and using Authelia for MFA.

In this example I'm just going to use two docker apache servers, each with just a single web page. These will then be used later to confirm the 1 and 2 factor authentication is working.

Create directories

We need to set up a couple of directories in our main docker directory.

cd ~/docker
mkdir 1-factor-website/www -p
mkdir 2-factor-website/www -p

Create two web pages

Next we can create two really simple web pages to demonstrate a successful authentication.

echo "<html><head><head><body><H1>1_factor_web_site</h1></body></html>" >>1-factor-website/www/index.html

echo "<html><head><head><body><H1>2_factor_web_site</h1></body></html>" >>2-factor-website/www/index.html

Create the docker-compose files

We need to docker compose files, on for each separate web app, or web page in this example.

cd ~/docker/1-factor-website/

The create a docker-compose.yaml file with the information below:

services:
  apache:
    image: httpd:latest
    container_name: 1-factor-website
    ports:
    - '8001:80'
    volumes:
    - ./www:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs

Then the second docker-compose.yaml file:

cd ~/docker/2-factor-website/

Containing the following information:

services:
  apache:
    image: httpd:latest
    container_name: 2-factor-website
    ports:
    - '8002:80'
    volumes:
    - ./www:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs

Deploy the two example web apps

Each of the two apache web servers can now be started:

cd ~/docker/1-factor-website/
docker compose up -d
cd ~/docker/2-factor-website/
docker compose up -d

The result should be two containers now running each serving a very basic web site.

Confirm that the Containers are running

If we do a docker ps command now we have the following output:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                      COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS                  PORTS                                       NAMES
6ba6ccf4dbab   httpd:latest               "httpd-foreground"       57 seconds ago       Up 55 seconds           0.0.0.0:8002->80/tcp, :::8002->80/tcp       2-factor-website
b9bc5cf4ead4   httpd:latest               "httpd-foreground"       About a minute ago   Up About a minute       0.0.0.0:8001->80/tcp, :::8001->80/tcp       1-factor-website
cbbea3df4065   authelia/authelia:latest   "/app/entrypoint.sh"     23 hours ago         Up 22 hours (healthy)   0.0.0.0:9091->9091/tcp, :::9091->9091/tcp   authelia
b3ffd4b3d811   postgres:15                "docker-entrypoint.s…"   23 hours ago         Up 22 hours             5432/tcp                                    auth_database
1ea07c6a02e4   redis:7                    "docker-entrypoint.s…"   23 hours ago         Up 22 hours             6379/tcp                                    auth_redis

Next Steps

Once we have these sites running, and assuming that Authelia for the MFA functionality has been configured, and is up and running we can go to the next step of this blog series.