I’ll be the dissenting voice to say, no you don’t need it. If you keep things updated and follow best practices you should be fine. Unless you piss off a state actor.

That being said, it would be wise to have 2fa on everything if you can.

As am alternative for Authelia you can take a look at Authentik. I didn’t use it by myself, but read a lot of it. Configuration is done via GUI and not text based like Authelia.

IMHO a much more straight and easier approach would be to use a reverse proxy (like Nginx Proxy Manager and use basic auth.

Since you’re already using cloudflare, you might want to consider using Cloudflare Zero Trust, which is free for the first 50 users.

Here is an example on how to gate a gitlab instance behind Cloudflare Zero Trust login wall. You should be able to substitute it with any web applications easily enough. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/tutorials/gitlab/

Personally I’m using Keycloak and OAuth2-Proxy though, but they can be quite an ordeal to setup.

Do you need to expose the services to the entire Internet or can you use something like tailscale or zerotier (these require installing an app on each remote device, but don’t open up ports to the internet).

I started up setting up authelia this week so I could have 2fa on immich, then stopped when I learned it doesn’t have built in ldap. So I set up authentik and it’s been solid enough so far

I used to think Authelia will allow you to consume external SSO… turns out I was wrong, maybe? So now I think I’m the odd ball here and think it might not be a good idea to deploy Authelia.

Here’s my thought process:

I have some apps I want to secure — they may or may not have already got a bake in authentication where they’ve got my password (ideally, just for that one app managed via password manager, but I’ll be the first to admit that’s not always the case). Passwords are icky, and even though they’re hashed, ideally hundreds of thousands of times, a leak / compromise is not unheard of.

Now, in order to secure these apps, the last thing I want is now to also worry about another app storing the password becoming the single point of failure.

In my mind, if it is literally just for me, I’d look at getting my reverse proxy to handle forward auth via OAuth to some much larger and trusted provider with MFA — Google, Microsoft, GitHub, etc. — and trust that their entire department responsible for auth will be smarter than some open source deployment I try to maintain/keep up.

In my mind, if it is more than just me, I’d look at getting something to consume multiple external providers, such that allows for the users to choose their desired provider, as well as allow me to slap an unified branding. So in this case I’d be looking at something like Authentik, Keycloak, or FusionAuth.

I just really don’t want to deal with handling/storing passwords.

But hey what kind of issues are you running into with Authelia? Is it just deploying/setting up? Or is it integrating with their supported identity provider (ie ldap)? Or something else all together?

I did it for remote access to my ARR services. I then found another use where you can set it for matrix server authentication. I also plan to integrate it with forgejo when I get the chance. I keep finding more uses as time goes.

Why does it sound like Mike Tyson answering the question “what is the smallest continent?”

It is worth but think about:

Must you open ports for the complete internet? Maybe one ip (your company) is enough? Also …

I use with Authelia a tls cert in caddy so only browser (mobiles also) with this cert can reach my site… and my services behind Authelia …