authentik/web

authentik WebUI

This is the default UI for the authentik server. The documentation is going to be a little sparse for awhile, but at least let's get started.

The Theory of the authentik UI

In Peter Naur's 1985 essay Programming as Theory Building, programming is described as creating a mental model of how a program should run, then writing the code to test if the program can run that way.

The mental model for the authentik UI is straightforward. There are five "applications" within the UI, each with its own base URL, router, and responsibilities, and each application needs as many as three contexts in which to run.

The three contexts corresponds to objects in the API's model section, so let's use those names.

• The root Config. The root configuration object of the server, containing mostly caching and error reporting information. This is misleading, however; the Config object contains some user information, specifically a list of permissions the current user (or "no user") has.
• The root CurrentTenant. This describes the Brand information UIs should use, such as themes, logos, favicon, and specific default flows for logging in, logging out, and recovering a user password.
• The current SessionUser, the person logged in: username, display name, and various states. (Note: the authentik server permits administrators to "impersonate" any other user in order to debug their authentikation experience. If impersonation is active, the user field reflects that user, but it also includes a field, original, with the administrator's information.)

(There is a fourth context object, Version, but its use is limited to displaying version information and checking for upgrades. Just be aware that you will see it, but you will probably never interact with it.)

There are five applications. Two (loading and api-browser) are trivial applications whose insides are provided by third-party libraries (Patternfly and Rapidoc, respectively). The other three are actual applications. The descriptions below are wholly from the view of the user's experience:

• Flow: From a given URL, displays a form that requests information from the user to accomplish a task. Some tasks require the user to be logged in, but many (such as logging in itself!) obviously do not.
• User: Provides the user with access to the applications they can access, plus a few user settings.
• Admin: Provides someone with super-user permissions access to the administrative functions of the authentik server.

Mental Model

• Upon initialization, every authentik UI application fetches Config and CurrentTenant. User and Admin will also attempt to load the SessionUser; if there is none, the user is kicked out to the Flow for logging into authentik itself.
• Config, CurrentTenant, and SessionUser, are provided by the @goauthentik/api application, not by the codebase under ./web. (Where you are now).
• Flow, User, and Admin are all called Interfaces and are found in ./web/src/flow/FlowInterface, ./web/src/user/UserInterface, ./web/src/admin/AdminInterface, respectively.

Inside each of these you will find, in a hierarchal order:

• The context layer described above
  • A theme managing layer
  • The orchestration layer:
    • web socket handler for server-generated events
    • The router
      • Individual routes for each vertical slice and its relationship to other objects:

Each slice corresponds to an object table on the server, and each slice usually consists of the following:

• A paginated collection display, usually using the Table foundation (found in ./web/src/elements/Table)
• The ability to view an individual object from the collection, which you may be able to:
  • Edit
  • Delete
• A form for creating a new object
• Tabs showing that object's relationship to other objects
  • Interactive elements for changing or deleting those relationships, or creating new ones.
  • The ability to create new objects with which to have that relationship, if they're not part of the core objects (such as User->MFA authenticator apps, since the latter is not a "core" object and has no tab of its own).

We are still a bit "all over the place" with respect to sub-units and common units; there are folders common, elements, and components, and ideally they would be:

• common: non-UI related libraries all of our applications need
• elements: UI elements shared among multiple applications that do not need context
• components: UI elements shared among multiple that use one or more context

... but at the moment there are some context-sensitive elements, and some UI-related stuff in common.

Comments

NOTE: The comments in this section are for specific changes to this repository that cannot be reliably documented any other way. For the most part, they contain comments related to custom settings in JSON files, which do not support comments.

• tsconfig.json:
  • compilerOptions.useDefineForClassFields: false is required to make TSC use the "classic" form of field definition when compiling class definitions. Storybook does not handle the ESNext proposed definition mechanism (yet).
  • compilerOptions.plugins.ts-lit-plugin.rules.no-unknown-tag-name: "off": required to support rapidoc, which exports its tag late.
  • compilerOptions.plugins.ts-lit-plugin.rules.no-missing-import: "off": lit-analyzer currently does not support path aliases very well, and cannot find the definition files associated with imports using them.
  • compilerOptions.plugins.ts-lit-plugin.rules.no-incompatible-type-binding: "warn": lit-analyzer does not support generics well when parsing a subtype of HTMLElement. As a result, this threw too many errors to be supportable.