ORY Hydra is a hardened, OpenID Certified OAuth 2.0 Server and OpenID Connect Provider optimized for low-latency, high throughput, and low resource consumption. ORY Hydra is not an identity provider (user sign up, user login, password reset flow), but connects to your existing identity provider through a login and consent app. Implementing the login and consent app in a different language is easy, and exemplary consent apps (Go, Node) and SDKs are provided.
If you're looking to jump straight into it, go ahead:
- Run your own OAuth 2.0 Server - step by step guide: A in-depth look at setting up ORY Hydra and performing a variety of OAuth 2.0 Flows.
- ORY Hydra 5 Minute Tutorial: Set up and use ORY Hydra using Docker Compose in under 5 Minutes. Good for quickly hacking a Proof of Concept.
- Install and Set Up ORY Hydra: An advanced look at installation options and interaction with ORY Hydra.
- Integrating your Login and Consent UI with ORY Hydra: The go-to place if you wish to adopt ORY Hydra in your new or existing stack.
Besides mitigating various attack vectors, such as database compromisation and OAuth 2.0 weaknesses, ORY Hydra is also able to securely manage JSON Web Keys. Click here to read more about security.
Table of Contents
- What is ORY Hydra?
- Quickstart
- Ecosystem
- Security
- Benchmarks
- Telemetry
- Documentation
- Libraries and third-party projects
- Blog posts & articles
ORY Hydra is a server implementation of the OAuth 2.0 authorization framework and the OpenID Connect Core 1.0. Existing OAuth2 implementations usually ship as libraries or SDKs such as node-oauth2-server or fosite, or as fully featured identity solutions with user management and user interfaces, such as Dex.
Implementing and using OAuth2 without understanding the whole specification is challenging and prone to errors, even when SDKs are being used. The primary goal of ORY Hydra is to make OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect 1.0 better accessible.
ORY Hydra implements the flows described in OAuth2 and OpenID Connect 1.0 without forcing you to use a "Hydra User Management" or some template engine or a predefined front-end. Instead it relies on HTTP redirection and cryptographic methods to verify user consent allowing you to use ORY Hydra with any authentication endpoint, be it authboss, User Frosting or your proprietary Java authentication.
The ORY community stands on the shoulders of individuals, companies, and maintainers. We thank everyone involved - from submitting bug reports and feature requests, to contributing patches, to sponsoring our work. Our community is 1000+ strong and growing rapidly. The ORY stack protects 1.200.000.000+ API requests every month with over 15.000+ active service nodes. We would have never been able to achieve this without each and everyone of you!
The following list represents companies that have accompanied us along the way and that have made outstanding contributions to our ecosystem. If you think that your company deserves a spot here, reach out to [email protected] now!
Please consider giving back by becoming a sponsor of our open source work on Patreon or Open Collective.
| Type | Name | Logo | Website |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsor | Raspberry PI Foundation |  |
raspberrypi.org |
| Contributor | Kyma Project |  |
kyma-project.io |
| Sponsor | ThoughtWorks |  |
thoughtworks.com |
| Sponsor | Tulip |  |
tulip.com |
| Sponsor | Cashdeck / All My Funds |  |
cashdeck.com.au |
| Sponsor | 3Rein |  |
3rein.com |
| Contributor | Hootsuite |  |
hootsuite.com |
| Adopter * | Segment |  |
segment.com |
| Adopter * | Arduino |  |
arduino.cc |
| Sponsor | OrderMyGear |  |
ordermygear.com |
| Sponsor | Spiri.bo |  |
spiri.bo |
We also want to thank all individual contributors
as well as all of our backers
and past & current supporters (in alphabetical order) on Patreon: Alexander Alimovs, Billy, Chancy Kennedy, Drozzy, Edwin Trejos, Howard Edidin, Ken Adler Oz Haven, Stefan Hans, TheCrealm.
* Uses one of ORY's major projects in production.
ORY Hydra implements Open Standards set by the IETF:
- The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework
- OAuth 2.0 Threat Model and Security Considerations
- OAuth 2.0 Token Revocation
- OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection
- OAuth 2.0 for Native Apps
- Proof Key for Code Exchange by OAuth Public Clients
and the OpenID Foundation:
- OpenID Connect Core 1.0
- OpenID Connect Discovery 1.0
- OpenID Connect Dynamic Client Registration 1.0
- OpenID Connect Front-Channel Logout 1.0
- OpenID Connect Back-Channel Logout 1.0
ORY Hydra is an OpenID Foundation certified OpenID Provider (OP).
The following OpenID profiles are certified:
- Basic OpenID Provider (response types
code) - Implicit OpenID Provider (response types
id_token,id_token+token) - Hybrid OpenID Provider (response types
code+id_token,code+id_token+token,code+token) - OpenID Provider Publishing Configuration Information
- Dynamic OpenID Provider
To obtain certification, we deployed the reference user login and consent app (unmodified) and ORY Hydra v1.0.0.
This section is a quickstart guide to working with ORY Hydra. In-depth docs are available as well:
The tutorial teaches you to set up ORY Hydra, a Postgres instance and an exemplary identity provider written in React using docker-compose. It will take you about 5 minutes to complete the tutorial.
Head over to the ORY Developer Documentation to learn how to install ORY Hydra on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Docker and how to build ORY Hydra from source.
We build Ory on several guiding principles when it comes to our architecture design:
- Minimal dependencies
- Runs everywhere
- Scales without effort
- Minimize room for human and network errors
ORY's architecture designed to run best on a Container Orchestration Systems such as Kubernetes, CloudFoundry, OpenShift, and similar projects. Binaries are small (5-15MB) and available for all popular processor types (ARM, AMD64, i386) and operating systems (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows) without system dependencies (Java, Node, Ruby, libxml, ...).
ORY Kratos is an API-first Identity and User Management system that is built according to cloud architecture best practices. It implements core use cases that almost every software application needs to deal with: Self-service Login and Registration, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA), Account Recovery and Verification, Profile and Account Management.
ORY Hydra is an OpenID Certified™ OAuth2 and OpenID Connect Provider can connect to any existing identity database (LDAP, AD, KeyCloak, PHP+MySQL, ...) and user interface.
ORY Oathkeeper is a BeyondCorp/Zero Trust
Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) with configurable authentication, authorization,
and request mutation rules for your web services: Authenticate JWT, Access
Tokens, API Keys, mTLS; Check if the contained subject is allowed to perform the
request; Encode resulting content into custom headers (X-User-ID), JSON Web
Tokens and more!
ORY Keto is a policy decision point. It uses a set of access control policies, similar to AWS IAM Policies, in order to determine whether a subject (user, application, service, car, ...) is authorized to perform a certain action on a resource.
Why should I use ORY Hydra? It's not that hard to implement two OAuth2 endpoints and there are numerous SDKs out there!
OAuth2 and OAuth2 related specifications are over 400 written pages. Implementing OAuth2 is easy, getting it right is hard. ORY Hydra is trusted by companies all around the world, has a vibrant community and faces millions of requests in production each day. Of course, we also compiled a security guide with more details on cryptography and security concepts. Read the security guide now.
If you think you found a security vulnerability, please refrain from posting it publicly on the forums, the chat, or GitHub and send us an email to [email protected] instead.
Our continuous integration runs a collection of benchmarks against ORY Hydra. You can find the results here.
Our services collect summarized, anonymized data that can optionally be turned off. Click here to learn more.
The Guide is available here.
The HTTP API is documented here.
New releases might introduce breaking changes. To help you identify and incorporate those changes, we document these changes in UPGRADE.md and CHANGELOG.md.
Run hydra -h or hydra help.
We encourage all contributions and encourage you to read our contribution guidelines.
You need Go 1.13+ with GO111MODULE=on and (for the test suites):
- Docker and Docker Compose
- Makefile
- NodeJS / npm
It is possible to develop ORY Hydra on Windows, but please be aware that all guides assume a Unix shell like bash or zsh.
When cloning ORY Hydra, run make deps. It will download several required dependencies. If you haven't run the command
in a while it's probably a good idea to run it again.
You can format all code using make format. Our CI checks if your code is properly formatted.
There are three types of tests you can run:
- Short tests (do not require a SQL database like PostgreSQL)
- Regular tests (do require PostgreSQL, MySQL, CockroachDB)
- End to end tests (do require databases and will use a test browser)
Short tests run fairly quickly. You can either test all of the code at once:
go test -short ./...or test just a specific module:
cd client; go test -short .Regular tests require a database set up. Our test suite is able to work with docker directly (using ory/dockertest) but we encourage to use the Makefile instead. Using dockertest can bloat the number of Docker Images on your system and are quite slow. Instead we recommend doing:
make testPlease be aware that make test recreates the databases every time you run make test. This can be annoying if
you are trying to fix something very specific and need the database tests all the time. In that case we
suggest that you initialize the databases with:
make resetdb
export TEST_DATABASE_MYSQL='mysql://root:secret@(127.0.0.1:3444)/mysql?parseTime=true&multiStatements=true'
export TEST_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL='postgres://postgres:[email protected]:3445/postgres?sslmode=disable'
export TEST_DATABASE_COCKROACHDB='cockroach://[email protected]:3446/defaultdb?sslmode=disable'Then you can run go test as often as you'd like:
go test -p 1 ./...
# or in a module:
cd client; go test .The E2E tests use Cypress to run full browser tests. You can execute these tests with:
make e2e
The runner will not show the Browser window, as it runs in the CI Mode (background). That makes debugging these type of tests very difficult, but thankfully you can run the e2e test in the browser which helps with debugging! Just run:
./test/e2e/circle-ci.bash memory --watch
# Or for the JSON Web Token Access Token strategy:
# ./test/e2e/circle-ci.bash memory-jwt --watchor if you would like to test one of the databases:
make resetdb
export TEST_DATABASE_MYSQL='mysql://root:secret@(127.0.0.1:3444)/mysql?parseTime=true&multiStatements=true'
export TEST_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL='postgres://postgres:[email protected]:3445/postgres?sslmode=disable'
export TEST_DATABASE_COCKROACHDB='cockroach://[email protected]:3446/defaultdb?sslmode=disable'
# You can test against each individual database:
./test/e2e/circle-ci.bash postgres --watch
./test/e2e/circle-ci.bash memory --watch
./test/e2e/circle-ci.bash mysql --watch
# ...Once you run the script, a Cypress window will appear. Hit the button "Run all Specs"!
The code for these tests is located in ./cypress/integration and ./cypress/support and ./cypress/helpers. The website you're seeing is located in ./test/e2e/oauth2-client.
We embed the SQL files into the binary. If you make changes to any .sql file, you need to run:
make sqlbinYou can build a development Docker Image using:
make dockerIf you wish to check your code changes against any of the docker-compose quickstart files, run:
make docker
docker compose -f quickstart.yml up # ....Official:
Community:
- Creating an oauth2 custom lamda authorizer for use with Amazons (AWS) API Gateway using Hydra
- Warning, ORY Hydra has changed almost everything since writing this article: Hydra: Run your own Identity and Access Management service in <5 Minutes