Running Keycloak

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In this lesson, we'll set up Keycloak, a powerful identity and access management solution, to handle authentication and authorization for our event ticket platform. We'll configure Keycloak using Docker Compose and create the initial realm, client, and user settings needed for our application.

Set Up Keycloak with Docker Compose

Docker Compose makes it easy to run Keycloak alongside our other services. Let's add the Keycloak service to our existing docker-compose.yml:

  keycloak:
    image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:latest
    ports:
      - "9090:8080"
    environment:
      KEYCLOAK_ADMIN: admin
      KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD: admin
    volumes:
      - keycloak-data:/opt/keycloak/data
    command:
      - start-dev
      - --db=dev-file

volumes:
  keycloak-data:
    driver: local

The configuration maps Keycloak's default port 8080 to 9090 on our host machine to avoid conflicts with our Spring Boot application.

We're using volumes to persist Keycloak's data between container restarts, unlike our PostgreSQL setup where we prefer a fresh start each time.

Configuring Keycloak

Once Keycloak is running, we need to set up three main components:

Create a realm named event-ticket-platform
Set up a client for our frontend application
Create a test user to represent an organizer

For the client configuration:

Client ID: event-ticket-platform-app
Client authentication: Off (for public access)
Valid redirect URIs: http://localhost:5173
Post logout redirect URIs: http://localhost:5173

Connecting Spring Boot to Keycloak

To connect our Spring Boot application to Keycloak, we add this property to application.properties:

spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.jwt.issuer-uri=http://localhost:9090/realms/event-ticket-platform

This tells Spring Security to validate JWTs against our Keycloak instance.

Summary

Set up Keycloak using Docker Compose with data persistence
Created realm, client, and test user in Keycloak
Connected Spring Boot application to Keycloak for JWT validation