Chat · Discussions · Newsletter · Docs · Try Ory Network · Jobs

Ory Hydra is a hardened, OpenID Certified OAuth 2.0 Server and OpenID Connect
Provider optimized for low-latency, high throughput, and low resource
consumption. It connects to your existing identity provider through a login and
consent app, giving you absolute control over the user interface and experience.

• What is Ory Hydra?
  • Why Ory Hydra
  • OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards
  • OpenID Connect Certified
• Deployment options
  • Use Ory Hydra on the Ory Network
  • Self-host Ory Hydra
• Quickstart
• Who is using Ory Hydra
• Ecosystem
  • Ory Kratos: Identity and User Infrastructure and Management
  • Ory Hydra: OAuth2 & OpenID Connect Server
  • Ory Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy
  • Ory Keto: Access Control Policies as a Server
• Documentation
• Developing Ory Hydra
• Security
  • Disclosing vulnerabilities
• Telemetry
• Libraries and third-party projects

What is Ory Hydra?

Ory Hydra is a server implementation of the OAuth 2.0 authorization framework
and the OpenID Connect Core 1.0. It follows
cloud architecture best practices
and focuses on:

• OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect flows
• Token issuance and validation
• Client management
• Consent and login flow orchestration
• JWKS management
• Low latency and high throughput

We recommend starting with the
Ory Hydra introduction docs to learn more about
its architecture, feature set, and how it compares to other systems.

Why Ory Hydra

Ory Hydra is designed to:

• Be a standalone OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect server without user management
• Connect to any existing identity provider through a login and consent app
• Give you absolute control over the user interface and experience flows
• Work with any authentication endpoint:
  Ory Kratos,
  authboss,
  User Frosting, or your proprietary system
• Scale to large numbers of clients and tokens
• Fit into modern cloud native environments such as Kubernetes and managed
  platforms

OAuth2 and OpenID Connect: Open Standards

Ory Hydra implements Open Standards set by the IETF:

• The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework
• OAuth 2.0 Threat Model and Security Considerations
• OAuth 2.0 Token Revocation
• OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection
• OAuth 2.0 for Native Apps
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol
• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Management Protocol
• Proof Key for Code Exchange by OAuth Public Clients
• JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Client Authentication and Authorization Grants

and the OpenID Foundation:

• OpenID Connect Core 1.0
• OpenID Connect Discovery 1.0
• OpenID Connect Dynamic Client Registration 1.0
• OpenID Connect Front-Channel Logout 1.0
• OpenID Connect Back-Channel Logout 1.0

OpenID Connect Certified

Ory Hydra is an OpenID Foundation
certified OpenID Provider (OP).

The following OpenID profiles are certified:

• Basic OpenID Provider
  (response types code)
• Implicit OpenID Provider
  (response types id_token, id_token+token)
• Hybrid OpenID Provider
  (response types code+id_token, code+id_token+token, code+token)
• OpenID Provider Publishing Configuration Information
• Dynamic OpenID Provider

To obtain certification, we deployed the
reference user login and consent app
(unmodified) and Ory Hydra v1.0.0.

Deployment options

You can run Ory Hydra in two main ways:

• As a managed service on the Ory Network
• As a self hosted service under your own control, with or without the Ory
  Enterprise License

Use Ory Hydra on the Ory Network

The Ory Network is the fastest way to use Ory
services in production. Ory OAuth2 & OpenID Connect is powered by the open
source Ory Hydra server and is API compatible.

The Ory Network provides:

• OAuth2 and OpenID Connect for single sign on, API access, and machine to
  machine authorization
• Identity and credential management that scales to billions of users and
  devices
• Registration, login, and account management flows for passkeys, biometrics,
  social login, SSO, and multi factor authentication
• Prebuilt login, registration, and account management pages and components
• Low latency permission checks based on the Zanzibar model with the Ory
  Permission Language
• GDPR friendly storage with data locality and compliance in mind
• Web based Ory Console and Ory CLI for administration and operations
• Cloud native APIs compatible with the open source servers
• Fair, usage based pricing

Sign up for a
free developer account
to get started.

Self-host Ory Hydra

You can run Ory Hydra yourself for full control over infrastructure, deployment,
and customization.

The install guide explains how to:

• Install Hydra on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Docker
• Configure databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and CockroachDB
• Deploy to Kubernetes and other orchestration systems
• Build Hydra from source

This guide uses the open source distribution to get you started without license
requirements. It is a great fit for individuals, researchers, hackers, and
companies that want to experiment, prototype, or run unimportant workloads
without SLAs. You get the full core engine, and you are free to inspect, extend,
and build it from source.

If you run Hydra as part of a business-critical system, for example OAuth2 and
OpenID Connect for all your users, you should use a commercial agreement to
reduce operational and security risk. The Ory Enterprise License (OEL)
layers on top of self-hosted Hydra and provides:

• Additional enterprise features that are not available in the open source
  version
• Regular security releases, including CVE patches, with service level
  agreements
• Support for advanced scaling, multi-tenancy, and complex deployments
• Premium support options with SLAs, direct access to engineers, and onboarding
  help
• Access to a private Docker registry with frequent and vetted, up-to-date
  enterprise builds

For guaranteed CVE fixes, current enterprise builds, advanced features, and
support in production, you need a valid
Ory Enterprise License and access
to the Ory Enterprise Docker registry. To learn more,
contact the Ory team.

Quickstart

Install the Ory CLI and
create a new project to try Ory OAuth2 & OpenID Connect.

# Install the Ory CLI if you do not have it yet:
bash <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ory/meta/master/install.sh) -b . ory
sudo mv ./ory /usr/local/bin/

# Sign in or sign up
ory auth

# Create a new project
ory create project --create-workspace "Ory Open Source" --name "GitHub Quickstart" --use-project

Try out the OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow:

ory create oauth2-client \
    --name "Client Credentials Demo" \
    --grant-type client_credentials
# Note the client ID and secret from output

ory perform client-credentials \
    --client-id <your-client-id> \
    --client-secret <your-client-secret>
# Note the access token from output

ory introspect token <your-access-token>

Try out the OAuth 2.0 Authorize Code + OpenID Connect flow:

ory create oauth2-client \
    --name "Authorize Code with OpenID Connect Demo" \
    --grant-type authorization_code,refresh_token \
    --response-type code \
    --redirect-uri http://127.0.0.1:4446/callback

ory perform authorization-code \
    --client-id <your-client-id> \
    --client-secret <your-client-secret>

Who is using Ory Hydra

The Ory community stands on the shoulders of individuals, companies, and
maintainers. The Ory team thanks everyone involved - from submitting bug reports
and feature requests, to contributing patches and documentation. The Ory
community counts more than 50.000 members and is growing. The Ory stack protects
7.000.000.000+ API requests every day across thousands of companies. None of
this would have been possible without each and everyone of you!

The following list represents companies that have accompanied us along the way
and that have made outstanding contributions to our ecosystem. If you think
that your company deserves a spot here, reach out to
office@ory.sh now!

Name	Logo	Website	Case Study
OpenAI		openai.com	OpenAI Case Study
Fandom		fandom.com	Fandom Case Study
Lumin		luminpdf.com	Lumin Case Study
Sencrop		sencrop.com	Sencrop Case Study
OSINT Industries		osint.industries	OSINT Industries Case Study
HGV		hgv.it	HGV Case Study
Maxroll		maxroll.gg	Maxroll Case Study
Zezam		zezam.io	Zezam Case Study
T.RowePrice		troweprice.com
Mistral		mistral.ai
Axel Springer		axelspringer.com
Hemnet		hemnet.se
Cisco		cisco.com
Presidencia de la República Dominicana		presidencia.gob.do
Moonpig		moonpig.com
Booster		choosebooster.com
Zaptec		zaptec.com
Klarna		klarna.com
Raspberry PI Foundation		raspberrypi.org
Tulip		tulip.com
Hootsuite		hootsuite.com
Segment		segment.com
Arduino		arduino.cc
Sainsbury's		sainsburys.co.uk
Contraste		contraste.com
inMusic		inmusicbrands.com
Buhta		buhta.com
Amplitude		amplitude.com

Many thanks to all individual contributors

Ecosystem

We build Ory on several guiding principles when it comes to our architecture
design:

• Minimal dependencies
• Runs everywhere
• Scales without effort
• Minimize room for human and network errors

Ory's architecture is designed to run best on a Container Orchestration system
such as Kubernetes, CloudFoundry, OpenShift, and similar projects. Binaries are
small (5-15MB) and available for all popular processor types (ARM, AMD64, i386)
and operating systems (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows) without system
dependencies (Java, Node, Ruby, libxml, ...).

Ory Kratos: Identity and User Infrastructure and Management

Ory Kratos is an API-first Identity and User
Management system that is built according to
cloud architecture best practices.
It implements core use cases that almost every software application needs to
deal with: Self-service Login and Registration, Multi-Factor Authentication
(MFA/2FA), Account Recovery and Verification, Profile, and Account Management.

Ory Hydra: OAuth2 & OpenID Connect Server

Ory Hydra is an OpenID Certified™ OAuth2 and
OpenID Connect Provider which easily connects to any existing identity system by
writing a tiny "bridge" application. It gives absolute control over the user
interface and user experience flows.

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity & Access Proxy

Ory Oathkeeper is a BeyondCorp/Zero Trust
Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) with configurable authentication, authorization,
and request mutation rules for your web services: Authenticate JWT, Access
Tokens, API Keys, mTLS; Check if the contained subject is allowed to perform the
request; Encode resulting content into custom headers (X-User-ID), JSON Web
Tokens and more!

Ory Keto: Access Control Policies as a Server

Ory Keto is a policy decision point. It uses a
set of access control policies, similar to AWS IAM Policies, in order to
determine whether a subject (user, application, service, car, ...) is authorized
to perform a certain action on a resource.

Documentation

The full Ory Hydra documentation is available at
www.ory.sh/docs/hydra, including:

• Installation guides
• Configuration reference
• HTTP API documentation
• Security architecture
• Performance benchmarks

For upgrading and changelogs, check
releases tab and
CHANGELOG.md.

Developing Ory Hydra

See DEVELOP.md for information on:

• Contribution guidelines
• Prerequisites
• Install from source
• Running tests
• Build Docker image
• Preview API documentation

Security

OAuth2 and OAuth2 related specifications are over 400 written pages.
Implementing OAuth2 is easy, getting it right is hard. Ory Hydra is trusted by
companies all around the world, has a vibrant community and faces millions of
requests in production each day. Read
the security guide for
more details on cryptography and security concepts.

Disclosing vulnerabilities

If you think you found a security vulnerability, please refrain from posting it
publicly on the forums, the chat, or GitHub. You can find all info for
responsible disclosure in our
security.txt.

Telemetry

Our services collect summarized, anonymized data that can optionally be turned
off. Click here to learn more.

Libraries and third-party projects

Official:

• User Login & Consent Example

Community:

• Visit
  this document for an overview of community projects and articles

Developer Blog:

• Visit the Ory Blog for guides, tutorials and
  articles around Ory Hydra and the Ory ecosystem.