Below details how to setup Danswer with basic username/password auth. While this is the easiest way to get started, we recommend picking Google OAuth / OIDC / SAML in the long term (if possible). If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us - we’re more than happy to help you pick which auth approach is best for your organization.

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Env Variables

In your .env file, make sure you have the following value set:

AUTH_TYPE=basic

If you don’t want to require email verification, then you’re done!

After restarting Danswer, you should see the following screen appear on your next visit:

SignUp

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Email Verification

With Email verification enabled, users will not be able to interact with Danswer until they have proven that they are the owner of the email address used to sign up. Specifically, when setup an email will be sent to all new sign ups with a “link to verify”.

To setup email verification, you can add the following to your .env file:

AUTH_TYPE=basic

REQUIRE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION=true
SMTP_USER=<EMAIL_TO_SEND_VERIFICATION_EMAILS> e.g. noreply@danswer.ai
SMTP_PASS=<PASSWORD_FOR_THE_EMAIL_ABOVE>

# The below is only needed if not using a Google-powered email account
SMTP_SERVER=<YOUR_SMTP_SERVER>
SMTP_PORT=<PORT_YOUR_SMTP_SERVER_LISTENS_ON>  # default value is 587

The email account specified by SMTP_USER / SMTP_PASS will be used to send the verification emails to new sign ups. If using a gmail-powered account, you will need to allow username / password login by third party services. To do this, you can follow the official guide from Google here.

Deploy on Digital OceanGoogle OAuth Setup