Using KeyCloak on your local machine

Table of Contents

Every project with more than one user must have some authentication and authorization. These days, there is a quite handy and easy to user solution for user management that comes in a project called KeyCloak. KeyCloak provides all necessary functionality like user registration, sign-in, and sign-in via Google, Facebook, and whatnot, all with support for modern standards like OICD.

KeyCloak is sponsored by Red Hat and is very well maintained. Regular updates and support for new technologies have been seen in recent years. KeyCloak could be a good choice for every company if it trusts open-source projects.

In this post, I describe how to install KeyCloak on a local machine for development purposes. The Version described here is
Version 22.0.1

Downloading and starting KeyCloak

KeyCloak comes in a zip or tar file and can be downloaded from here: https://www.keycloak.org/downloads

If you download the zip file, you can extract it wherever you want and start KeyCloak by:

> cd KeyCloak
> bin/bc.sh start-dev

Attention I tried it with the most recent version 22.0.1 and
got an error. KeyCloak 21.1.1 works fine.

After start up keycloak is reachable under the URL

http://localhost:8080

When you first visit this page KeyCloak will ask you to set a
administrator user name and password:

file

Enter the administrators user name and the password and you will see the
new Welcome screen:

file

Now you can navigate to the administrator console via the link. Enter
the credentials as specified above and you will see the main page of
KeyCloak:

file

YEP! That's it. You set up a KeyCloak instance for you personal development.

What's next

In the next posts I will set up a realm for development. A Real is a
area where users, roles, groups and clients are managed.

After that I will bring KeyCloak into a cloud environment with docker-compose, NgInx and MariaDB.

Some Notes

Do not use this set up method for production. For production you have to do a lot more.

I tried the new Version 22.0.1 of KeyCloak and got an error during the start procedure:

ERROR: Failed to run 'build' command.
ERROR: Name is too long
For more details run the same command passing the '--verbose' option. Also you can use '--help' to see the details about the usage of the particular command.

This error is still under investigation...