Chapter 1: Getting Started with Keycloak
If you are new to Keycloak, this chapter will quickly get you up to speed. We'll start with a brief introduction to Keycloak. Then, you will find out how easy it is to install Keycloak and get it up and running. After we have started Keycloak, you will learn about the Keycloak admin console, which provides a great interface for managing and configuring Keycloak. Finally, we'll take a quick look at the Keycloak account console as well, which lets users of your applications manage their own accounts.
By the end of this chapter, you will know how to get started with the Keycloak server, and understand how you can use the Keycloak admin console to manage Keycloak. You will learn how to prepare Keycloak with an example user in order to get started securing your first application in the next chapter.
In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:
- Introducing Keycloak
- Installing and running Keycloak
- Discovering the Keycloak admin and account consoles
Technical requirements
For this chapter, in order to run Keycloak, you will need to have Docker (https://www.docker.com/) or JDK 8+ (https://openjdk.java.net/) installed on your workstation.
Check out the following link to see the Code in Action video:
https://bit.ly/3nRLgng
Introducing Keycloak
Keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management tool with a focus on modern applications such as single-page applications, mobile applications, and REST APIs.
The project was started in 2014 with a strong focus on making it easier for developers to secure their applications. It has since grown into a well-established open source project with a strong community and user base. It is used in production for scenarios ranging from small websites with only a handful of users up to large enterprises with millions of users.
Keycloak provides fully customizable login pages, including strong authentication, as well as various flows, such as the recovery of passwords, requiring users to regularly update the passwords, accepting terms and conditions, and a lot more. All of this without any need to add anything to your applications, or any coding at all. All pages visible to your users support custom themes, making it very easy to modify the look and feel of the pages to integrate with your corporate branding and existing applications.
By delegating authentication to Keycloak, your applications do not need to worry about different authentication mechanisms, or how to safely store passwords. This approach also provides a higher level of security as applications do not have direct access to user credentials; they are instead provided with security tokens that give them only access to what they need.
Keycloak provides single sign-on as well as session management capabilities, allowing users to access multiple applications, while only having to authenticate once. Both users themselves and administrators have full visibility to where users are authenticated, and can remotely terminate sessions when required.
Keycloak builds on industry standard protocols supporting OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML 2.0. Using industry standard protocols is important from both a security perspective and in terms of making it easier to integrate with existing and new applications.
Keycloak comes with its own user database, which makes it very easy to get started. You can also easily integrate with existing identity infrastructure. Through its identity brokering capabilities, you can plug in existing user bases from social networks, or other enterprise identity providers. It can also integrate with existing user directories, such as Active Directory and LDAP servers.
Keycloak is a lightweight and easy-to-install solution. It is highly scalable and provides high availability through clustering capabilities. For additional redundancy, Keycloak also supports clustering to multiple data centers.
A lot of effort has gone into making Keycloak usable out of the box, supporting common use cases, but, at the same time, it is highly customizable and extendable when needed. Keycloak has a large number of extension points where you can implement and deploy custom code to Keycloak to modify existing behavior or add completely new capabilities. Examples of extensions that can be written to Keycloak include custom authentication mechanisms, integrations with custom user stores, and the custom manipulation of tokens. You can even implement your own custom login protocols.
This section was a very brief introduction to the features and capabilities of Keycloak. As this book aims to give you a practical guide to Keycloak, we will come back to many of these features in later chapters, where you will learn firsthand how you can put these to use.
Installing and running Keycloak
In this section, you will quickly learn how to install and run Keycloak. Once you have Keycloak up and running, we will take a look at the Keycloak admin cons...
