We've received a lot of support requests about the right way to set up SSO connections. We've published a 5 minute video showing you how to do it easily. Also, the script is included below in case you miss anything!
There are a lot of guides out there, official and unofficial, for how to secure applications with Keycloak. The subject is rather broad, so it's difficult to know where to start. To begin, we'll be focusing on Keycloak's use of OpenID Connect (OIDC), and how to use that standard, along with some helpful libraries, to secure a simple but instructive application.
For the purposes of the sample, we'll actually be using two common applications, a frontend single-page application (SPA) written in JavaScript, and a backend REST API written for Node.js. The language we selected for the sample is JavaScript, but the principles apply no matter the implementation technology you choose.
Someone who is reading this article is probably very different that the average internet user when it comes to passwords. Developers and IT admins, either because of security savvy or compliance, use password managers, multi-factor authentication (MFA) mechanisms, or prefer sites that offer passwordless authentication. Furthermore, they are keenly aware of the weaknesses in their personal "attack surface", and search for ways to balance convenience with risk.
But you are here because you want to find a way to implement magic links quickly. First, some background.
The extension is available on Github.
Email is one of the highest touch-points for users with your application. Being able to configure and customize emails is key to user management and experience.
One of the first things you will need to do when getting a Keycloak Realm ready for use is to set up your email server configuration. There are many system emails that are sent to users in the course of verifying and updating user accounts: Email address verification, magic links, password reset, account update, login failure notifications, identity provider linking, etc.
In order to provide your users with a positive experience, these messages need a way to get to them. Keycloak supports any internet reachable SMTP server. If you are currently testing, and don't have an email server or service that you currently use, SendGrid provides free accounts that allow you to send up to 100 emails per day forever. For debugging, you can also use a service like MailTrap to give you a catch-all for emails coming from Keycloak.
We've been pretty quiet over the summer. Since we released the Organizations and Magic Link extensions and open sourced them, there has been a lot of interest in using Phase Two.
We were flattered by the inbound interest, but our small team wasn't able to keep up with demand for trial accounts. Rather than scramble against that demand, we opted to pause new accounts, and instead build a self-service tool to allow anyone to quickly provision a new deployment a try it out.
Today we're announcing the beta launch of the Phase Two Self-service deployment tool. This tool allows you to easily create new deployments of the Phase Two enhanced version of Keycloak in our secure, highly-available clusters. In the future, it will also allow you to deploy dedicated instances that use your own database.
Today we're making two announcements: A new, highly-requested feature, and the open sourcing of the extension at the same time. We've received a lot of requests from customers to implement "magic link" login functionality that would allow users to login to an application using a link sent to their email or over some other secure channel.
Today we're open sourcing a set of Keycloak extensions, specifically our Organizations extension, that are focused on solving several of the common use cases of multi-tenant, SaaS applications that Keycloak does not solve out of the box. We are doing this in line with our commitment to keeping our core extensions open source. These extensions are the basis of our Organizations features, which allow Phase Two customers to model their own customers in their systems and create enterprise "team" functionality that suits their business case.
Following our post about our wizard product, we received an overwhelming amount of interest in it. Many customers of our cloud offering asked for it as a portal for their organization administrators to set up their identity providers. On-prem customers said that one consistent onboarding hurdle was SSO complexity, and asked for it to be included in the bundled distribution.
Working with one of our customers, we discovered that even the most technically literate developer or ops professional could look at the configuration for an SSO connection like it was a foreign language. While our configuration interface attempts to cover all possible options, and document clearly what each option means, it can still be entirely unclear what is required during a setup.
Per our commitment to keeping our core extensions open source, today we're releasing our Keycloak extensions to the event system. These extensions form the basis of how our Audit Log features are built.