Authenticate Anything

Once your set of internal applications grows greater than an order of 10s, you can end up in a scenario where credentials storage for each service gets out of control. Users might start complaining about how difficult it is to handle multiple passwords, and your day could turn into a password reset ticket nightmare. If you wonder whether a single sign-on (SSO) experience à la Google and Amazon is possible, even at a smaller scale, the answer is "Yes"! Keycloak can do exactly that.

A comprehensive administration introduction to Keycloak appeared previously in ADMIN [1], so in this article you will travel through the other end of the spectrum: How to enable your application with proper SSO, with or without writing code.

The Keycloak Project

Keycloak is a mature free and open source software (FOSS) project whose first production release goes back to the year 2014 [2]. It's largely funded and developed by Red Hat, and it is the software on which their SSO commercial offering is based. The tool's goal is to provide a modern and secure SSO experience for any application on the basis of either the OIDC or SAML framework (see the "OIDC vs. SAML" box).

Until version 16, inclusive, Keycloak ran on top of the WildFly application server (formerly JBoss). Since version 17, however, the project has shifted to Quarkus, breaking some configurations but gaining in performance and general lightness.

SSO Benefits

You have surely dealt with at least one user management application, the most famous of which is Microsoft Active Directory (see the "User Brokering" box). Moreover, you might have run into independent applications that run their own user databases. With SSO, you can reduce the complexity of working with these applications. The major benefits are:

• Managing your users all in one place
• Applications won't need to store user data or passwords
• Applications will benefit from password management or two-factor authentication out of the box

Getting Started

To begin, you will deploy a Keycloak instance with the official Docker image (see the "Get Docker-Ready" box). The application will be exposed on port 8080 and will use an ad hoc Postgres instance for its data and configuration storage (Listing 1).

01 version: '2.4'
02 services:
03    keycloak:
04        container_name: keycloak
05        image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:17.0.1
06        ports:
07         - 8080:8080
08        environment:
09          - KEYCLOAK_ADMIN=admin
10          - KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=SOME_PASSWORD
11          - KC_DB=postgres
12          - KC_DB_URL=jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/keycloak
13          - KC_DB_USERNAME=postgres
14          - KC_DB_PASSWORD=SOME_DB_PASSWORD
15        command: ["start-dev"]
16
17    postgres:
18        container_name: postgres
19        image: postgres:14
20        environment:
21            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=SOME_DB_PASSWORD
22            - POSTGRES_DB=keycloak
23            - PGDATA=/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata
24        volumes:
25            - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data/pgdata
26
27 volumes:
28    pgdata:

# curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sudo bash -

Once the docker-compose.yml file is ready, start the service by typing

docker-compose up -d

After the startup phase is complete, you reach the Keycloak admin interface on http://localhost:8080 .