Ionize Documentation
Self-hosted CIAM and IAM platform built on Ory Kratos and Hydra
Welcome to the Ionize documentation.
Ionize is a self-hosted identity platform for modern applications. It combines Ory Kratos (identity management) and Ory Hydra (OAuth2/OIDC) into a dual-domain stack, one half for customer identity (CIAM), one half for employee identity (IAM), with an admin dashboard (Dashboard), a login UI (Auth), a deployment wizard (Deploy), and a shared encryption/settings library (SDK).
Where to start
| If you are… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Trying Ionize for the first time | Quickstart with ionctl |
| Deploying to production | Deploy with Deploy |
| Integrating an app against Ionize | Integrate, OAuth2 overview |
| Operating an existing deployment | Operate, runbooks |
| Inspecting your container images | Inspecting your containers |
| Looking for the API reference | Reference, APIs |
How this site is organized
The docs follow the lifecycle of an Ionize deployment, get it running, deploy it, operate it, develop against it, integrate apps with it, with deep reference material at the end.
- Get Started, try Ionize locally in five minutes.
- Deploy, provision a production deployment, by hand or with the Deploy wizard.
- Operate, runbooks for the daily work of running an identity platform: rotate keys, unlock accounts, audit secrets, watch certificates.
- Develop, workspace setup, contributor guides, testing strategy. Frames container inspection for licensees.
- Integrate, OAuth2 and OIDC flows from the perspective of an application integrating with Ionize.
- Identity, the identity model: schemas, flows, sessions, MFA, account linking.
- Security, threat model, encryption, headers, captcha, breach checks, supply chain.
- Reference, exhaustive API, configuration, schema, and catalog documentation. Most pages here are generated from source.
- Internals, per-repo deep dives into how the code works. Useful when inspecting your containers under the Ionize Free Container License.
- ADRs, architecture decision records.
- Cookbook, concrete recipes for common integrations.
- Migration, guides for moving from Auth0, Keycloak, Cognito, Okta, Firebase, and Supabase.
- Troubleshooting, diagnostics for known failure modes.
A note on scope
Ionize is eight Git repositories working together. Most of these docs describe surfaces that span more than one repo. When a page is tightly bound to a single repo, it links to the relevant GitHub source line. See Repo Map for the full inventory.