I’ve spent more time messing around with Stirling PDF and its new authentication feature over the past couple of days than I care to admit, and need to brain dump what I came up with.

So, some background first. Authentication for my homelab is currently run by Jumpcloud, since they’re the best bang for buck for my small environment (~4 users). They give me a user portal, support SAML and OIDC SSO, have an LDAP connector in case I have legacy stuff that need that, and there’s a somewhat useful Terraform module, albeit incomplete.

So, a bit of background. A lot of the websites that I maintain on a day-to-day basis are generated using Hugo, which basically creates a static website with none of the dependencies or vulnerabilities of the popular content management systems. These sites don’t need any PHP backend, PostgreSQL databases, or anything else of the sort. They’re just web pages, like the good old days.

It’s not often that I reconsider living in Pennsylvania. But when a storm that brings Jim Cantore (of The Weather Channel fame) to the Lehigh Valley for storm coverage, I quickly came to realize that my hometown was likely to disappear within a few short hours.

Winter Storm Gail dropped about a foot of snow on Northeast Pennsylvania, and it was pretty to watch while it fell. By the following morning, we had all come to truly understand that this wasn’t the light and fluffy stuff. This was the heavy, wet stuff that basically drives chiropractic practices through the winter.