Keycloak Local development

It's useful to be able to connect to a locally-running instance of Keycloak for integration testing the application. This guide explains how to set up the Keycloak Identity Provider from it's officially supported docker image quay.io/keycloak.

Notes on the Keycloak upgrade from Wildfly to Quarkus:

Old versions of Keycloak used an Application Server to manage deployment. However, Keycloak released a new version of the container that does not depend on an Application Server (Wildfly) for deployment. This keeps the image and the container much smaller and simpler. I recently upgraded Keycloak to use the new image, which depends on Quarkus instead of Wildfly.

It's important to keep in mind that our normal Keycloak deployment in AWS will make use of a reverse proxy. In AWS, we want to use a reverse proxy (the Load Balancer) to terminate SSL connections and forward the traffic to Keycloak via HTTP instead of over HTTPS.

Setting up Keycloak with a transient, in-memory database

TODO: fillmein

Setting up Keycloak with a persistent database

If you have already set up a persistent database, you can fill in the connection details and directly run the container. Then, you can connect to it in your browser using the command below:

docker run -p 8080:8080 \
    # If you're on a Mac 
    --platform linux/arm64 \
    -e KC_DB=postgres \
    -e KC_DB_URL_HOST=<HOSTNAME> \
    -e KC_DB_DATABASE=<DATABASE-NAME> \
    -e KC_DB_USERNAME=<USERNAME> \
    -e KC_DB_PASSWORD=<PASSWORD> \
    -e KC_HOSTNAME_STRICT=false \
    -e KC_EDGE=proxy \
    -e KC_HTTP_ENABLED=true \
    -e KC_FEATURES=token-exchange \
    quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:20.0.3 start
    ```

### Setting up a Local postgres database for testing
```bash
# Set up a local DB for the first time
createdb keycloak

# Log in and set up a user with correct permissions
psql keycloak
CREATE USER keycloak WITH PASSWORD 'keycloak';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON SCHEMA public to keycloak;

# Check that the user can login
psql keycloak -U keycloak

Make sure that the postgres database is listening on localhost:5432

lsof -i -P -n | GREP LISTEN

Then, you can run the container. NOTE: The "host.docker.internal" host is a Docker DNS entry that allows the Keycloak container to connect to the Postgres instance on the host. NOTE: The KEYCLOAK_ADMIN related env vars create a new Keycloak admin user that you can use to administer the Realms.

docker run -p 8080:8080 \
    # If you're on a Mac
    --platform linux/arm64 \
    -e KC_DB=postgres \
    -e KC_DB_URL_HOST="host.docker.internal" \
    -e KC_DB_DATABASE="keycloak" \
    -e KC_DB_USERNAME="keycloak" \
    -e KC_DB_PASSWORD="keycloak" \
    -e KC_HOSTNAME_STRICT=false \
    -e KC_EDGE=proxy \
    -e KC_HTTP_ENABLED=true \
    -e KC_FEATURES=token-exchange \
    -e KEYCLOAK_ADMIN=keycloak \
    -e KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=keycloak \
    quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:20.0.3 start

TODO: Set up test realm!! Then import test-keycloak-realm.json to set up the realm and test client This is a specific example showing how to set up the container connected to a locally running Postgres instance.