No problem. I hope you found it useful. Anubis is not AI. It discerns between bots/AI scrapers and legitimate users using a combination of heuristics and a mathematical challenge, thereby protecting the website that sits behind it. Check out the documentation at: https://anubis.techaro.lol/

For auth providers, I’ve tried all the ones you named. Here’s my brief analysis:

• Authelia - deployment and configuration is moderately complex but documentation is great and it works well with Caddy reverse proxy.
• Authentik - way too complex to deploy and configure, requires you to understand their concepts very well. I’d stay away from it.
• PocketID - super easy to deploy and configure. Passkeys are easier and arguably more secure than passwords and it supports a few methods other than passkeys.

With these services you mentioned you want to or are already hosting, you could use the following in the order they are listed:

1. Basic auth using Caddy (reverse proxy layer)
2. Anubis to ward off bots and scrapers (between reverse proxy and hosted service)
3. PocketID for auth (before service as single sign-on)

I would recommend 2 and 3 as 1 is pretty useless against a determined attacker. Anything that’s on the public internet is bound to be attacked at some point, so follow best practices and perform server hardening on the host machine. Remember, you classify the sensitivity of the data you host and determine the severity of the risk if that data were to be exposed. So work with that in mind when choosing an option.

Firstly, what’s your threat model - as in what are you trying to block? For SSH access, fail2ban works. For bots and scrapers, I’m not sure how effective it is. What jails have your enabled/configured for fail2ban?

I don’t have your setup, but like someone else here said, I use Caddy on Docker as a reverse proxy for all my self-hosted services running in Docker containers. One really effective means of blocking AI scrapers and bots is Anubis - https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis. It might be worth a shot. It works for me.