Configure Access Control Via Environment Variables about authelia

[james-d-elliott]

Thanks for choosing to submit a feature request. To clarify it is any configuration item which is not a list of primitive types, i.e. string, integer, boolean. If it's a list of objects / dictionaries it has this issue and there is no simple way to implement it.

We have had this discussion a few times including the one you linked where we rejected it and we're not implementing this as it would require a fairly custom environment parser. The parser would present a number of major hurdles and we're just not interested in too much custom handling. The automatic methods that already exist and are supported by the library we use cover most use cases.

Instead we are opting for allowing environment variables within the context of the config itself with the go templating engine which could theoretically be used by individuals to accomplish similar things. See here for the pending changes. We'd be willing to add more template functions to accomplish other goals especially if they existed in helm already.

It's difficult to know when to say no, but this is just not something we want to pigeonhole ourselves into even with the variation of the idea. As soon as people start using something like this they will inevitably misconfigure it and it will lead to unexpected scenarios. It will also fairly likely not work in an expected way for all users especially when they also have individual rules. I think there's a good argument to be had that the existing pending functionality can do exactly what you're describing with an outcome that is much more like what a user expects. The order actually really matters here and rather than the order being arbitrary the user is in control without having to develop our own parser semantics which will be hard to maintain.

I hope this doesn't discourage you in any way. I think the variation was an inspired workaround to the existing ideas which were rejected.