GitHub Authentication

Default Configuration

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. Once you authenticate with it, you grant Coder server read access to:

• Your GitHub user email
• Your GitHub organization membership
• 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.

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

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOW_SIGNUPS=true

To limit sign ups to members of specific GitHub organizations, set:

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_ALLOWED_ORGS="your-org"

For production deployments, we recommend configuring your own GitHub OAuth app as outlined below. The default is automatically disabled if you configure your own app or set:

CODER_OAUTH2_GITHUB_DEFAULT_PROVIDER_ENABLE=false

Step 1: Configure the OAuth application in GitHub

First, register a GitHub OAuth app. GitHub will ask you for the following Coder parameters:

• Homepage URL: Set to your Coder deployments 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

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

Coder will need 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

Navigate 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.