candid1.8.1

Candid lets Linux services authenticate identities through a dedicated server that provides macaroon-based authentication. As Canonical’s Candid Identity Manager, it gives administrators a shared identity service to place behind applications that need authenticated access. It is suited to teams managing service identities across multiple systems rather than implementing authentication separately in each application.

The current v1.8.1 release is freeware and supports amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, and s390x architectures, with snapd required. The snap’s configuration is kept at /var/snap/candid/current/config.yaml, giving operators a defined location for service settings. Developers can obtain the source from github.com/canonical/candid, and contributing through GitHub requires an account there.

Building Candid from source requires Go 1.23 or later, available through the Go snap, plus packages that let Go fetch and build its dependencies. Source checkouts are recommended outside the default GOPATH; if a checkout is placed inside GOPATH, GO111MODULE=on must be set. The store/mgostore component needs a running MongoDB server, either locally or on another system, with MGOCONNECTIONSTRING specifying its location or localhost port 27017 used by default.

The store/sqlstore component similarly needs a running PostgreSQL instance, configured through PostgreSQL’s standard environment variables. The MGO variable disables mgostore testing, while PGTESTDISABLE=1 skips PostgreSQL tests; make check runs the full test suite and go test runs tests for one package.