GitHub Authentication

By default, new Coder deployments use a Coder-managed GitHub app to authenticate users. We provide it for convenience, allowing you to experiment with Coder without setting up your own GitHub OAuth app.

If you authenticate with it, you grant Coder server read access to your GitHub user email and other metadata listed during the authentication flow.

This access is necessary for the Coder server to complete the authentication process. To the best of our knowledge, Coder, the company, does not gain access to this data by administering the GitHub app.

Default Configuration

To use the default configuration:

1. Install the GitHub app in any GitHub organization that you want to use with Coder.

   The default GitHub app requires device flow to authenticate. This is enabled by default when using the default GitHub app. If you disable device flow using CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_DEVICE_FLOW=false, it will be ignored.

2. By default, only the admin user can sign up. To allow additional users to sign up with GitHub, add:

   CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_SIGNUPS=true
   

3. (Optional) If you want to limit sign-ups to specific GitHub organizations, set:

   CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOWED_ORGS="your-org"
   

Disable the Default GitHub App

You can disable the default GitHub app by configuring your own app or by adding the following environment variable to your Coder server configuration:

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_DEFAULT_PROVIDER_ENABLE=false

Step 1: Configure the OAuth application in GitHub

1. Register a GitHub OAuth app.

2. GitHub will ask you for the following Coder parameters:

   • Homepage URL: Set to your Coder deployment's CODER_ACCESS_URL (e.g. https://coder.domain.com)

   • User Authorization Callback URL: Set to https://coder.domain.com

     If you want to allow multiple Coder deployments hosted on subdomains, such as coder1.domain.com, coder2.domain.com, to authenticate with the same GitHub OAuth app, then you can set User Authorization Callback URL to the https://domain.com

3. Take note of the Client ID and Client Secret generated by GitHub. You will use these values in the next step.

4. Coder needs permission to access user email addresses.

   Find the Account Permissions settings for your app and select read-only for Email addresses.

Step 2: Configure Coder with the OAuth credentials

Go to your Coder host and run the following command to start up the Coder server:

coder server --oauth2-github-allow-signups=true --oauth2-github-allowed-orgs="your-org" --oauth2-github-client-id="8d1...e05" --oauth2-github-client-secret="57ebc9...02c24c"

Alternatively, if you are running Coder as a system service, you can achieve the same result as the command above by adding the following environment variables to the /etc/coder.d/coder.env file:

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_SIGNUPS=true
CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOWED_ORGS="your-org"
CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_CLIENT_ID="8d1...e05"
CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET="57ebc9...02c24c"

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_EVERYONE=true

Once complete, run sudo service coder restart to reboot Coder.

If deploying Coder via Helm, you can set the above environment variables in the values.yaml file as such:

coder:
  env:
    - name: CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_SIGNUPS
      value: "true"
    - name: CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_CLIENT_ID
      value: "533...des"
    - name: CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET
      value: "G0CSP...7qSM"
    # If setting allowed orgs, comment out CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_EVERYONE and its value
    - name: CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOWED_ORGS
      value: "your-org"
    # If allowing everyone, comment out CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOWED_ORGS and it's value
    #- name: CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_EVERYONE
    #  value: "true"

To upgrade Coder, run:

helm upgrade <release-name> coder-v2/coder -n <namespace> -f values.yaml

We recommend requiring and auditing MFA usage for all users in your GitHub organizations. This can be enforced from the organization settings page in the Authentication security sidebar tab.

Device Flow

Coder supports device flow for GitHub OAuth. This is enabled by default for the default GitHub app and cannot be disabled for that app.

For your own custom GitHub OAuth app, you can enable device flow by setting:

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_DEVICE_FLOW=true

Device flow is optional for custom GitHub OAuth apps. We generally recommend using the standard OAuth flow instead, as it is more convenient for end users.