17.1. Customization

There are several different ways to customize the UI of privacyIDEA.

17.1.1. Templates

You can change the HTML templates of the web UI as follows. You can create a copy of the orignial templates, modify them and use rewrite rules of your webserver to call your new, modified templates.

This way updates will not affect your modifications.

All HTML views are contained in:

static/components/<component>/views/<view>.html

You can find them on GitHub <https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea/tree/master/privacyidea/static> or at the according location in your installation.

Follow these basic steps:

  1. Create a new location, where you will keep your modifications safe from updates. You should create a directory like /etc/privacyidea/customization/ and put your modified views in there.

  2. Activate the rewrite rules in your web server. E.g. in the Apache configuration you can add entries like:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule "/static/components/login/views/login.html"  \
     "/etc/privacyidea/customization/mylogin.html"

    and apply all required changes to the file mylogin.html.

    Note

    In this case you need to create a RewriteRule for each file, you want to modify.

  3. Now activate mod_rewrite and reload apache2.

Warning

Of course - if there are functional enhancements or bug fixes in the original templates - your template will also not be affected by these.

17.1.1.1. Translating templates

The translation in privacyIDEA is very flexible (see Setup translation). But if you change the templates the normal translation with PO files can get a bit tricky.

Starting with privacyIDEA 3.0.1 you can use the scope variable browserLanguage in your custom templates.

You can print the browser language like this {{ browserLanguage }}.

And you can display text in different languages in divs like this:

<div ng-show="browserLanguage === 'de'">
    Das ist ein deutscher Text.
</div>
<div ng-show="browserLanguage === 'en'">
    This is an English text.
</div>

17.1.2. Themes

You can adapt the style and colors by changing CSS. There are at least two ways to do this.

17.1.2.1. Providing your own stylesheet in the config file

You can create your own CSS file to adapt the look and feel of the Web UI. The default CSS is the bootstrap CSS theme. Using PI_CSS in pi.cfg you can specify the URL of your own CSS file. The default CSS file url is /static/contrib/css/bootstrap-theme.css. The file in the file system is located at privacyidea/static/contrib/css. You might add a directory privacyidea/static/custom/css/ and add your CSS file there.

17.1.2.2. Use web server rewrite modules

Again you can also use the Apache rewrite module to replace the original css file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule "/static/contrib/css/bootstrap-theme.css"  \
     "/etc/privacyidea/customization/my.css"

A good stating point might be the themes at http://bootswatch.com.

Note

If you add your own CSS file, the file bootstrap-theme.css will not be loaded anymore. So you might start with a copy of the original file.

17.1.2.3. Use web server substitute module

You can also use the substitute module of the Apache webserver. It is not clear how much performance impact you get, since this module can scan and replace any text that is delivered by the web server.

If you for example want to replace the title of the webpages, you could do it like this:

<Location "/">
    AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
    Substitute "s/>privacyidea Authentication System</>My own 2FA system</ni"
</Location>

17.1.5. Headers and Footers

The administrator can change the header and footer of each page. We call this the baseline of the web UI. The original baseline is contained in static/templates/baseline.html. You can use a web UI policy to change this baseline or - of course - could use the web server rewrite module.

Read more about changing it via the web UI policies at custom_baseline.

17.1.6. Tokenwizard

You can add additional HTML elements above and underneath the enrollment wizard pages. Read the Token Enrollment Wizard and tokenwizard to learn more about those code snippets.

17.1.7. Token customization

Some tokens allow a special customization.

The paper token allows you to add CSS for styling the printed output and add additional headers and footers. Read more about it at the paper token Customization.