Using the binary

If you prefer using bare-metal over docker you can do so by using the tinyauth binary. This setup is ideal for LXC containers or machines that don't need to run docker but you would still like to use tinyauth to protect your services.

Downloading the binary

To begin with, simply download the binary from the latest Github release. There are builds available for both arm64 and amd64 linux machines. I suggest renaming the binary to tinyauth as that's what we will use for the rest of this guide. I also suggest ensuring that the binary is executable:

chmod +x tinyauth

Configuring

To configure tinyauth you can either use CLI flags or environment variables (recommended). To use environment variables you will need to download the example environment file from Github:

curl -o tinyauth.env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/steveiliop56/tinyauth/refs/heads/main/.env.example

Then you can simply edit the tinyauth.env file and either replace the template values with actual values or simply remove the environment variables you do not need.

Alternatively you can use CLI flags to configure tinyauth. This is not recommended as it can get quite complex and your shell may parse the values incorrectly. Make sure to always use quotes (') to ensure that the values are given to tinyauth correctly.

A full list of environment variables and CLI flags is available in the Configuration page.

Running

After you are done with configuration you can start tinyauth. If you are using an environment variables you need to set them in your shell, this can be done by running:

source tinyauth.env

Finally you can start up the tinyauth server with:

./tinyauth

If you chose to use CLI flags you need to pass them to tinyauth with:

./tinyauth --secret=example --app-url=https://tinyauth.example.com

Running as a systemd service

if you need tinyauth to autostart on boot you can do so by creating a systemd service (assuming you are using systemd as your init system). Firstly you will need to create the /etc/systemd/system/tinyauth.service file with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Tinyauth service
After=network.target

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/some/path/tinyauth.env
ExecStart=/some/path/tinyauth
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

INFO

Make sure to replace the paths in the service with the actual locations of your environment and binary file.

TIP

If you are using CLI flags, you can remove the EnvironmentFile line and add your flags to to the ExecStart line, e.g. ExecStart=/some/path/tinyauth --secret=secret --app-url=https://tinyauth.example.com.

Finally we need to reload the systemd daemon:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

And start our new service:

sudo systemctl enable --now tinyauth

You can view the logs of tinyauth by running:

sudo journalctl -efu tinyauth

That's it! Tinyauth should automatically start on boot now!