30 posts tagged with "open_source"

Today we're launching keycloak-skills — an open-source Agent Skills plugin that teaches Claude how to configure Keycloak correctly — and the Phase Two Keycloak MCP server, 158 admin tools that let it do the work against a live cluster instead of just telling you what to type.

Two commands to install. Works against any Keycloak — and gets sharper the closer you get to ours. Don't have a Keycloak yet? The agent can provision one for you and it's free for 30 days.

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.

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.

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.

If you are exposing tools over MCP, you usually do not want every client on the network calling them anonymously. Even for a local prototype, you typically want a real login flow, consent, scoped access tokens, and a clean way to validate who is allowed to run what.

Keycloak is the easiest way to do that without inventing your own authorization layer. It already handles browser login, consent, token issuance, JWKS discovery, and OAuth metadata. Your MCP server just needs to behave like a protected resource and validate bearer tokens correctly.

In this guide, we will build a tiny calculator MCP server in Python, protect it with Keycloak, and connect to it from VS Code using Dynamic Client Registration (DCR). By the end, VS Code will open a browser to Keycloak, you will sign in, approve access to the mcp:run scope, and then call your MCP tools directly from chat.

We’re excited to announce built-in observability for dedicated clusters, starting with log downloads in the Phase Two dashboard.

We’re pleased to share that Cockroach Labs has published a new blog post featuring Phase Two and our managed Keycloak hosting platform.

At Phase Two, we are committed to providing our customers with the most secure and reliable managed Keycloak hosting platform. As part of this commitment, we are excited to announce the release of new security capabilities for Keycloak clusters available through the Phase Two Dash.