54 posts tagged with "keycloak"

SCIM — System for Cross-domain Identity Management — is a standard REST API for creating, updating, and deactivating user accounts across systems. SSO answers "can this person log in?" SCIM answers "does this person have an account at all, and should they still?"

If you sell to enterprises, you will be asked for it. This post covers what it is, when you actually need it, and a working walkthrough of Keycloak's native SCIM API — which arrived as a preview feature and is not enabled by default.

Everything here was run against Keycloak 26.7.3.

We're open-sourcing keycloak-atomic-auth-flows, a Keycloak extension that replaces an entire set of authentication flows, authenticator configs, and their bindings in one atomic, transactional request.

It was built in partnership with Gusto, who use Keycloak for user authentication and rely on Phase Two for enterprise Keycloak support. It has been running in their production environment for almost a year. The public repository is the extraction of that work into a standalone extension anyone can install.

You clicked "Log in", Keycloak showed you "We are sorry… Invalid parameter: redirect_uri", and no amount of staring at the admin console explains why.

The short answer: the redirect_uri your application sent does not match, character for character after wildcard expansion, any entry in that client's Valid redirect URIs. The long answer is that Keycloak's matching rules are stricter and stranger than almost everyone assumes — in particular, it will reject any redirect_uri containing a query string, no matter what you registered.

Everything below was tested against Keycloak 26.7.3.

Bottom line: not an emergency, but upgrade this week if you use token exchange with a Google or Microsoft broker, or FGAP v2 to delegate admin rights. On 26.4, 26.5 or 26.6 there is no patch for you today. Keycloak 26.7.3 fixes 20 CVEs — one high, 17 medium, one low, one unrated — plus two breaking changes. Every one needs a delegated admin account, client credentials, or an intercepted authorization code; the single high is in a test-only dependency.

Every login, logout, failed password attempt, and admin change in Keycloak produces an event. That's exactly what you want for security auditing and product analytics — until you realize where Keycloak puts them: in the same relational database that your authentication path depends on. At scale, event storage becomes a problem you can't ignore. Here's how we solved it, and how the key piece — an MDC-logging EventStoreProvider — is open source so you can solve it too.

Today we're launching a new way to run Phase Two: the Starter cluster tier, available at $149 per month. Starter bundles the same feature set as our existing dedicated clusters into a plan that's accessible for teams getting their use case off the ground or running development environments with lower SLA needs. It also includes a 30-day free trial, so you can validate your setup before committing.

Log into the dashboard and click Create Cluster to pick the new tier and provision yours.

Today we're launching Observability for dedicated Keycloak clusters — built directly into the Phase Two dashboard with zero setup. Requests, event data, and live logs are all there the moment your cluster is running. No agents to install, no log shippers to configure, no Prometheus, Grafana, or Loki stack to stand up and maintain.

A few quarters ago you got handed a single-line ask: "we need enterprise SSO and directory sync by the end of the quarter." Maybe the deal was a Fortune-500 logo. Maybe it was a Series B requirement. Either way you found WorkOS, wired in their SDK in a long weekend, shipped the deal, and got the high five.

Then the renewal came in. The seat-based pricing, that sounded harmless when you had two customers using SSO, looks different when you have forty. Suddenly there's a line item on a board slide that scales linearly with your enterprise revenue — a parasite that eats into the very margin that the enterprise tier was supposed to fund. The CFO walks over and asks you to "fix it."

Here is the awkward truth nobody tells the engineer-on-the-spot: the WorkOS feature set has had a fully open-source equivalent for years. Keycloak handles SSO. Phase Two's organizations extension handles multi-tenant orgs. The identity provider wizard handles the same admin-portal flow your customers see in WorkOS today. The catch is that nobody wanted to spend the runway to migrate.

We've now built the tool that turns that "we'll deal with it later" debt into an afternoon of work. Why? Because WorkOS customers are starting to wake up to Keycloak, and they're coming to us in droves.

We're shipping experimental SCIM 2.0 provisioning for the Phase Two Organizations extension. Each organization in a realm can now act as its own SCIM 2.0 service provider, so an upstream IdP like Okta or Entra ID can push users into a specific tenant rather than into the realm as a whole.

This is the piece of the multi-tenant story that Keycloak's stock SCIM support doesn't address today, and it's been a heavily requested item from customers running Organizations in production.

Keycloak theming has always been a pain point. The default themes that come with Keycloak leave a lot to be desired stylistically and cannot be customized easily. We have maintained our own set of disparate custom themes for the login, email and admin consoles but that has led to a maintenance nightmare and a disjointed user experience.

We've completely rebuilt our bundled Keycloak themes. What used to live as a tangle of custom pages inside a forked Keycloak repository is now a first-class Keycloakify-based React application that ships four themes: login, admin, account, and email. The result is faster to maintain, far more capable, and dramatically better out of the box for the organizations using Phase Two today.

Starting now, all Phase Two containers ship with this theme bundled. Any realm you create through the Phase Two Dashboard automatically gets the new login, admin, account, and email themes active—no configuration required. The first time a user hits your login page or receives an email from your realm, it already looks good.