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ORY Hydra is a hardened OAuth2 and OpenID Connect server optimized for low-latency, high throughput, and low resource consumption. ORY Hydra is not an identity provider (user sign up, user log in, password reset flow), but connects to your existing identity provider through a consent app. Implementing the consent app in a different language is easy, and exemplary consent apps (Go, Node) and SDKs are provided.

Besides mitigating various attack vectors, such as database compromisation and OAuth 2.0 weaknesses, ORY Hydra is able to securely manage JSON Web Keys, and has a sophisticated policy-based access control you can use if you want to. Click here to read more about security.

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Table of Contents

• What is ORY Hydra?
  • OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards!
• Quickstart
  • 5 minutes tutorial: Run your very own OAuth2 environment
  • Installation
    • Download binaries
    • Using Docker
    • Building from source
• Ecosystem
  • ORY Security Console: Administrative User Interface
  • ORY Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy
• Security
  • Disclosing vulnerabilities
• Telemetry
• Documentation
  • Guide
  • HTTP API documentation
  • Upgrading and Changelog
  • Command line documentation
  • Develop
• 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 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, auth0.com or your proprietary PHP authentication.

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 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Management Protocol
• 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

Quickstart

This section is a quickstart 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: Run your very 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

There are various ways of installing ORY Hydra on your system.

Download binaries

The client and server binaries are downloadable at releases. There is currently no installer available. You have to add the ORY Hydra binary to the PATH environment variable yourself or put the binary in a location that is already in your path (/usr/bin, ...). If you do not understand what that all of this means, ask in our chat channel. We are happy to help.

Using Docker

Starting the host is easiest with docker. The host process handles HTTP requests and is backed by a database. Read how to install docker on Linux, OSX or Windows. ORY Hydra is available on Docker Hub.

You can use ORY Hydra without a database, but be aware that restarting, scaling or stopping the container will lose all data:

$ docker run -e "DATABASE_URL=memory" -e "ISSUER=https://localhost:4444/" -d --name my-hydra -p 4444:4444 oryd/hydra
ec91228cb105db315553499c81918258f52cee9636ea2a4821bdb8226872f54b

Note: We had to create a new docker hub repository. Tags prior to 0.7.5 are available here.

Using the client command line interface: You can enter into the ORY Hydra container and execute the ORY Hydra command from there:

$ docker exec -i -t <hydra-container-id> /bin/sh
# e.g. docker exec -i -t ec91228 /bin/sh

root@ec91228cb105:/go/src/github.com/ory/hydra# hydra
Hydra is a twelve factor OAuth2 and OpenID Connect provider

[...]

Building from source

If you wish to compile ORY Hydra yourself, you need to install and set up Go 1.9+ and add $GOPATH/bin to your $PATH as well as golang/dep. To do so, run the following commands in a shell (bash, sh, cmd.exe, ...):

go get -d -u github.com/ory/hydra
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ory/hydra
dep ensure
go install github.com/ory/hydra
hydra

Notes

• We changed organization name from ory-am to ory. In order to keep backwards compatibility, we did not rename Go packages.
• You can ignore warnings similar to package github.com/ory/hydra/cmd/server: case-insensitive import collision: "github.com/Sirupsen/logrus" and "github.com/sirupsen/logrus".

Ecosystem

ORY Security Console: Administrative User Interface

The ORY Security Console. connects with your existing ORY Hydra and ORY Oathkeeper isntallation and lets you manage and monitor them through an intuitive UI.

ORY Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy

ORY Oathkeeper is a BeyondCorp/Zero Trust Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) built on top of OAuth2 and ORY Hydra.

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.

Telemetry

ORY Hydra collects summarized, anonymized telemetry which can optionally be turned off. Click here to learn more.

Documentation

Guide

The Guide 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 UPGRADE.md and CHANGELOG.md.

Command line documentation

Run hydra -h or hydra help.

Develop

Developing with ORY Hydra is as easy as:

go get -d -u github.com/ory/hydra
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ory/hydra
dep ensure
go test ./...

Then run it with in-memory database:

DATABASE_URL=memory go run main.go host

Notes

• We changed organization name from ory-am to ory. In order to keep backwards compatibility, we did not rename Go packages.
• You can ignore warnings similar to package github.com/ory/hydra/cmd/server: case-insensitive import collision: "github.com/sirupsen/logrus" and "github.com/sirupsen/logrus".

Libraries and third-party projects

Official:

• Consent App Example written in Go
• Exemplary Consent App with Express and NodeJS

Community:

• Consent App SDK for Go
• ORY Hydra middleware for Gin
• Kubernetes helm chart

Blog posts & articles

• 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

Documentation

Overview

Package main ORY Hydra - Cloud Native OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect Server

Welcome to the ORY Hydra HTTP API documentation. You will find documentation for all HTTP APIs here. Keep in mind that this document reflects the latest branch, always. Support for versioned documentation is coming in the future.

Schemes: http, https
Host:
BasePath: /
Version: Latest
License: Apache 2.0 https://github.com/ory/hydra/blob/master/LICENSE
Contact: ORY <hi@ory.am> https://www.ory.sh

Consumes:
- application/json
- application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Produces:
- application/json

SecurityDefinitions:
oauth2:
    type: oauth2
    authorizationUrl: https://your-hydra-instance.com/oauth2/auth
    tokenUrl: https://your-hydra-instance.com/oauth2/token
    flow: accessCode
    scopes:
      hydra.clients: "A scope required to manage OAuth 2.0 Clients"
      hydra.policies: "A scope required to manage access control policies"
      hydra.warden: "A scope required to make access control inquiries"
      hydra.warden.groups: "A scope required to manage warden groups"
      hydra.keys.get: "A scope required to fetch JSON Web Keys"
      hydra.keys.create: "A scope required to create JSON Web Keys"
      hydra.keys.delete: "A scope required to delete JSON Web Keys"
      hydra.keys.update: "A scope required to get JSON Web Keys"
      hydra.consent: "A scope required to fetch and modify consent requests"
      offline: "A scope required when requesting refresh tokens"
      openid: "Request an OpenID Connect ID Token"
basic:
    type: basic

Extensions:
---
x-request-id: string
x-forwarded-proto: string
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