---
title: Full development environment
---

## Backend

To create a local development setup for authentik, you need the following:

### Requirements

- Python 3.10
- poetry, which is used to manage dependencies, and can be installed with `pip install poetry`
- Go 1.16
- PostgreSQL (any recent version will do)
- Redis (any recent version will do)

For PostgreSQL and Redis, you can use the docker-compose file in `scripts/`. You can also use a native install, if you prefer.

### Setup

```shell
poetry shell # Creates a python virtualenv, and activates it in a new shell
poetry install # Install all required dependencies, including development dependencies
```

To configure authentik to use the local databases, create a file in the authentik directory called `local.env.yml`, with the following contents

```yaml
debug: true
postgresql:
  user: postgres

log_level: debug
secret_key: "A long key you can generate with `pwgen 40 1` for example"
```

To apply database migrations, run `make migrate`. This is needed after the initial setup, and whenever you fetch new source from upstream.

Afterwards, you can start authentik by running `make run`. authentik is now accessible under `localhost:9000`.

Generally speaking, authentik is a Django application, ran by gunicorn, proxied by a Go application. The Go application serves static files.

Most functions and classes have type-hints and docstrings, so it is recommended to install a Python Type-checking Extension in your IDE to navigate around the code.

Before committing code, run `make lint` to ensure your code is formatted well. This also requires `pyright@1.1.136`, which can be installed with npm.

Run `make gen` to generate an updated OpenAPI document for any changes you made.

## Frontend

By default, no compiled bundle of the frontend is included. To build the UI, you need Node 14 or newer.

To build the UI, run these commands:

```
cd web/
npm i
npm run build
```

If you want to make changes to the UI, run `npm run watch` instead.

To ensure the code is formatted well, run `npx eslint . --fix` and `npm run lit-analyse`.