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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 (Node) and SDKs for common languages are provided.

Ory Cloud

The easiest way to get started with Ory Software is in Ory Cloud! It is free for developers, forever, no credit card required!

Ory Cloud has easy examples, administrative user interfaces, hosted pages (e.g. for login or registration), support for custom domains, collaborative features for your colleagues, and much more!

Get Started

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 hacking a Proof of Concept.
• Run Ory Hydra in Docker: An advanced guide to a fully functional set up 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 a compromised database and OAuth 2.0 weaknesses, Ory Hydra is also able to securely manage JSON Web Keys. Click here to read more about security.

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Table of Contents

• What is Ory Hydra?
  • Who's using it?
  • OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards!
  • OpenID Connect Certified
• Quickstart
  • 5 minutes tutorial: Run your very own OAuth2 environment
  • Installation
• Ecosystem
  • Ory Kratos: Identity and User Infrastructure and Management
  • Ory Hydra: OAuth2 & OpenID Connect Server
  • Ory Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy
  • Ory Keto: Access Control Policies as a Server
• Security
  • Disclosing vulnerabilities
• Benchmarks
• Telemetry
• Documentation
  • Guide
  • HTTP API documentation
  • Upgrading and Changelog
  • Command line documentation
  • Develop
    • Dependencies
    • Formatting Code
    • Running Tests
      • Short Tests
      • Regular Tests
    • E2E Tests
    • Build Docker
    • Run the Docker Compose quickstarts
• Libraries and third-party projects
• Blog posts & articles

What is Ory Hydra?

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 Ory Fosite, or as fully featured identity solutions with user management and user interfaces, such as Keycloak.

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 Ory Kratos, authboss, User Frosting or your proprietary Java authentication.

Who's using it?

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 16.000.000.000+ API requests every month with over 250.000+ 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 office-muc@ory.sh 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	Tulip		tulip.com
Sponsor	Cashdeck / All My Funds		cashdeck.com.au
Contributor	Hootsuite		hootsuite.com
Adopter *	Segment		segment.com
Adopter *	Arduino		arduino.cc
Adopter *	DataDetect		unifiedglobalarchiving.com/data-detect/
Adopter *	Sainsbury's		sainsburys.co.uk
Adopter *	Contraste		contraste.com
Adopter *	Reyah		reyah.eu
Adopter *	Zero		getzero.dev
Adopter *	Padis		padis.io
Adopter *	Cloudbear		cloudbear.eu
Adopter *	Security Onion Solutions		securityonionsolutions.com
Adopter *	Factly		factlylabs.com
Adopter *	Nortal		nortal.com
Sponsor	OrderMyGear		ordermygear.com
Sponsor	Spiri.bo		spiri.bo
Sponsor	Strivacity		strivacity.com
Adopter *	Hanko		hanko.io
Adopter *	Rabbit		rabbit.co.th
Adopter *	inMusic		inmusicbrands.com
Adopter *	Buhta		buhta.com
Adopter *	Connctd		connctd.com
Adopter *	Paralus		paralus.io
Adopter *	TIER IV		tier4.jp
Adopter *	R2Devops		r2devops.io
Adopter *	LunaSec		lunasec.io
Adopter *	Serlo		serlo.org

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.

OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards!

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
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Management Protocol
• Proof Key for Code Exchange by OAuth Public Clients
• JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Client Authentication and Authorization Grants

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

OpenID Connect Certified

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.

Quickstart

This section is a starter guide to working with Ory Hydra. In-depth docs are available as well:

• The documentation is available here.
• The REST API documentation is available here.

5 minutes tutorial: Host your own OAuth2 environment

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.

Installation

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.

Ecosystem

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 is designed to run best on a Container Orchestration system 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: Identity and User Infrastructure and Management

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: OAuth2 & OpenID Connect Server

Ory Hydra is an OpenID Certified™ OAuth2 and OpenID Connect Provider which easily connects to any existing identity system by writing a tiny "bridge" application. It gives absolute control over the user interface and user experience flows.

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy

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: Access Control Policies as a Server

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.

Security

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.

Disclosing vulnerabilities

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 hi@ory.am instead.

Benchmarks

Our continuous integration runs a collection of benchmarks against Ory Hydra. You can find the results here.

Telemetry

Our services collect summarized, anonymized data that can optionally be turned off. Click here to learn more.

Documentation

Guide

The full Ory Hydra documentation is available here.

HTTP API documentation

The HTTP API is documented here.

Upgrading and Changelog

New releases might introduce breaking changes. To help you identify and incorporate those changes, we document these changes in CHANGELOG.md.

Command line documentation

Run hydra -h or hydra help.

Develop

We love all contributions! Please read our contribution guidelines.

Dependencies

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.

Formatting Code

You can format all code using make format. Our CI checks if your code is properly formatted.

Running Tests

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)

All of the above tests can be run using the makefile. See the commands below.

Makefile commands

# quick tests
make quicktest

# regular tests
make test
test-resetdb

# end-to-end tests
make e2e

Short Tests

It is recommended to use the make file to run your tests using make quicktest , however, you can still use the go test command.

Please note:

All tests run against a sqlite in-memory database, thus it is required to use the -tags sqlite,json1 build tag.

Short tests run fairly quickly. You can either test all of the code at once:

go test -v -failfast -short -tags sqlite,json1 ./...

or test just a specific module:

go test -v -failfast -short -tags sqlite,json1 ./client

or a specific test:

go test -v -failfast -short -tags sqlite,json1 -run ^TestName$ ./...

Regular Tests

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 test

Please 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 test-resetdb
export TEST_DATABASE_MYSQL='mysql://root:secret@(127.0.0.1:3444)/mysql?parseTime=true&multiStatements=true'
export TEST_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL='postgres://postgres:secret@127.0.0.1:3445/postgres?sslmode=disable'
export TEST_DATABASE_COCKROACHDB='cockroach://root@127.0.0.1:3446/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 .

E2E Tests

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 --watch

or if you would like to test one of the databases:

make test-resetdb
export TEST_DATABASE_MYSQL='mysql://root:secret@(127.0.0.1:3444)/mysql?parseTime=true&multiStatements=true'
export TEST_DATABASE_POSTGRESQL='postgres://postgres:secret@127.0.0.1:3445/postgres?sslmode=disable'
export TEST_DATABASE_COCKROACHDB='cockroach://root@127.0.0.1:3446/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.

OpenID Connect Conformity Tests

To run Ory Hydra against the OpenID Connect conformity suite, run

$ test/conformity/start.sh --build

and then in a separate shell

$ test/conformity/test.sh

Running these tests will take a significant amount of time which is why they are not part of the CI pipeline.

Build Docker

You can build a development Docker Image using:

make docker

Run the Docker Compose quickstarts

If you wish to check your code changes against any of the docker-compose quickstart files, run:

make docker
docker compose -f quickstart.yml up # ....

Add a new migration

1. mkdir persistence/sql/src/YYYYMMDD000001_migration_name/
2. Put the migration files into this directory, following the standard naming conventions. If you wish to execute different parts of a migration in separate transactions, add split marks (lines with the text --split) where desired. Why this might be necessary is explained in gobuffalo/fizz#104.
3. Run make persistence/sql/migrations/<migration_id> to generate migration fragments.
4. If an update causes the migration to have fewer fragments than the number already generated, run make persistence/sql/migrations/<migration_id>-clean. This is equivalent to a rm command with the right parameters, but comes with better tab completion.
5. Before committing generated migration fragments, run the above clean command and generate a fresh copy of migration fragments to make sure the sql/src and sql/migrations directories are consistent.

Libraries and third-party projects

Official:

• User Login & Consent Example

Community:

• Visit this document for an overview of community projects and articles

Developer Blog:

• Visit the Ory Blog for guides, tutorials and articles around Ory Hydra and the Ory ecosystem.