Skip to main content
Version: 7.3.x

TLS Configuration

There are two recommended configurations:

Terminate TLS at OAuth2 Proxy​

  1. Configure SSL Termination with OAuth2 Proxy by providing a --tls-cert-file=/path/to/cert.pem and --tls-key-file=/path/to/cert.key.

    The command line to run oauth2-proxy in this configuration would look like this:

    ./oauth2-proxy \
        --email-domain="yourcompany.com"  \
        --upstream=http://127.0.0.1:8080/ \
        --tls-cert-file=/path/to/cert.pem \
        --tls-key-file=/path/to/cert.key \
        --cookie-secret=... \
        --cookie-secure=true \
        --provider=... \
        --client-id=... \
        --client-secret=...

  2. With this configuration approach the customization of the TLS settings is limited.

    The minimal acceptable TLS version can be set with --tls-min-version=TLS1.3. The defaults set TLS1.2 as the minimal version. Regardless of the minimum version configured, TLS1.3 is currently always used as the maximal version.

    The server side cipher suites are the defaults from crypto/tls of the currently used go version for building oauth2-proxy.

Terminate TLS at Reverse Proxy, e.g. Nginx​

  1. Configure SSL Termination with Nginx (example config below), Amazon ELB, Google Cloud Platform Load Balancing, or ...

    Because oauth2-proxy listens on 127.0.0.1:4180 by default, to listen on all interfaces (needed when using an external load balancer like Amazon ELB or Google Platform Load Balancing) use --http-address="0.0.0.0:4180" or --http-address="http://:4180".

    Nginx will listen on port 443 and handle SSL connections while proxying to oauth2-proxy on port 4180. oauth2-proxy will then authenticate requests for an upstream application. The external endpoint for this example would be https://internal.yourcompany.com/.

    An example Nginx config follows. Note the use of Strict-Transport-Security header to pin requests to SSL via HSTS:

    server {
        listen 443 default ssl;
        server_name internal.yourcompany.com;
        ssl_certificate /path/to/cert.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /path/to/cert.key;
        add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=2592000;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4180;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Scheme $scheme;
            proxy_connect_timeout 1;
            proxy_send_timeout 30;
            proxy_read_timeout 30;
        }
    }

  2. The command line to run oauth2-proxy in this configuration would look like this:

    ./oauth2-proxy \
       --email-domain="yourcompany.com"  \
       --upstream=http://127.0.0.1:8080/ \
       --cookie-secret=... \
       --cookie-secure=true \
       --provider=... \
       --reverse-proxy=true \
       --client-id=... \
       --client-secret=...