History
Origin
OAuth2 Proxy began at Bitly as google_auth_proxy around 2014, a small proxy that gated internal tools behind a Google login. It was later generalised to support more providers and renamed to OAuth2 Proxy. The lineage and the Bitly origin are recorded in third-party write-ups of the project (source 4) and the project README (source 5).
The code that the current project descends from is the bitly/oauth2_proxy repository, which was no longer actively maintained. A community fork took over development.
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2014 | Created at Bitly as google_auth_proxy, later generalised and renamed to oauth2_proxy. |
| 2018 | Forked from bitly/oauth2_proxy into pusher/oauth2_proxy; the v3.0.0 series and later belong to this fork and diverge from the original. |
| 2020 | Repository renamed from pusher/oauth2_proxy to oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy under its own org; images move to quay.io/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy and the binary becomes oauth2-proxy. |
| 2025 | Accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 2025-10-02. |
How it evolved
The most consequential shift was governance, not code. Maintenance moved from a single company (Bitly) to a community fork hosted by Pusher, and then to an independent oauth2-proxy GitHub organisation in 2020 (source 5). The rename changed the binary name (from oauth2_proxy to oauth2-proxy) and the image registry, so the move was visible to every operator.
In October 2025 the project entered the CNCF Sandbox. The sandbox application (source 3) frames the motivation as long-term sustainability and clear, safe ownership under a neutral foundation, rather than a push to grow adoption. The onboarding is tracked separately (source 4).
Configuration has grown two parallel paths over time: the original flag and TOML based configuration, and a newer "alpha" YAML configuration. The loader still prefers legacy options and layers alpha config on top when supplied (main.go:84 onward, in loadConfiguration).
Where it stands now
The project ships tagged releases regularly; the most recent at the documented commit is v7.15.3 (2026-06-09), with the pinned master HEAD a few commits later. The Go module is github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy/v7 (go.mod:1) and it builds a static CGO_ENABLED=0 binary (Makefile:55-56). It is now a CNCF Sandbox project with an independent maintainer group and a broad contributor base (see Adoption).