amplify-js VS Keycloak

One note of caution, though: Amplify uses a frontend-only Cognito integration that stores long-lived, never-rotating refresh tokens in browser storage, where any XSS vulnerability would have access to them. A more secure approach is to implement a couple of backend API routes to store the refresh tokens in `HttpOnly` cookies instead, which I outlined here (option 1 in your case to support SSO). I'll probably open source a solution to do this early next year so we don't all have to keep reinventing this wheel (probably why AWS calls their conference re:invent).

I'm ramosbugs on GitHub (that comment is mine). If you subscribe to https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/1218 I'll post a comment there once I release a solution.

Amplify also lets you host a backend, which it runs in Lambda functions. You don't have a lot of control over it, but it works well for its intended audience: People who wouldn't know what to do if they had a lot of control over their Lambda functions. Amplify also lets you consume other AWS services easily, through declarative and easy-to-use libraries. That way, you can consume Cognito or S3 from the frontend without knowing a lot about Cognito or S3. Here's the complete list of libraries for Amplify, and you can check the Readme of the JavaScript one as an example of its features.

Whenever I call Storage.put() inside my React Native (with Expo) application, I get an error of [TypeError: undefined is not a function]. Doing some internet digging, after hours of searching, I found only one other reference to this kind of error, and that is with the DataStore: https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/10764

Hello! Can you please create a GitHub issue here for us to investigate this further? https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues

Thanks for bringing this up. This discussion on the project's github is equally insightful on the subject.

Amplify GitHub Issue

Bug: There is currently, at the time of writing, a bug in Amplify that does not allow us to use the voiceId “Kevin”, which we selected when creating the backend resources. Selecting the voiceId “Amy” works, so we will use that.

Keycloak, an open-source identity and access management solution, provides robust authentication and authorization services for modern applications. However, configuring Keycloak instances manually can be tedious and error-prone. In this blog post, we'll explore how to simplify Keycloak configuration using Terraform and Terragrunt, enabling infrastructure as code (IaC) practices for managing Keycloak realms, clients, users, and more.

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to secure a Vue.js Web application. We're going to leverage oidc-client-ts to integrate OIDC authentication with the Vue app. The oidc-client-ts package is a well-maintained and used library. It provides a lot of utilities for building out a fully production app.

Keycloak has been a leader in the Identity and Access Management world since its launch almost 8 years ago. It is an open-source offering under the stewardship of Red Hat

It sounds like what you're looking for is an identity provider.

A popular open source option is https://www.keycloak.org/

This application can manage your users, then you can use standards like OpenID or SAML to plug it into your application, of which there are usually many plugins to accomplish this depending on your tech stack.

KeyCloak is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that offers enterprise IAM solutions. Keycloak emphasizes proficient enterprise authorization solutions by providing:

Outline only uses SSO for authentication. The solution when self hosting is use a private keycloak server [1]. This allows you to do email based auth.

[1] https://www.keycloak.org/

> Keycloak was good but has too much legacy for 10+ years.

I got curious, actually seems to check out and explains why it's so well documented (but also complex and oftentimes confusing):

> The first production release of Keycloak was in September 2014, with development having started about a year earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/releases/tag/1.0.0.Fina...

> Don't outsource either your authentication or authorization. Run it in-house.

This is hard to do, though. I hope people here will drop a lot of combinations that work for them!

Personally, for a small/medium scale project, I went with:

Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

It supports various backing RDBMSes (like PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL and others), allows both users that you persist in your own DB, as well as various external sources, like social login across various platforms, is an absolute pain to configure and sometimes acts in stupid ways behind a reverse proxy, but has most of the features that you might ever want, which sadly comes coupled with some complexity and an enterprise feeling.

I quite like that it offers the login/registration views that you need with redirects, as well as user management, storing roles/permissions and other custom attributes. It's on par with what you'd expect and should serve you nicely.

mod_auth_openidc: https://github.com/OpenIDC/mod_auth_openidc

This one's a certified OpenID Connect Relying Party implementation for... Apache2/httpd.

Some might worry about the performance and there are other options out there (like a module for OpenResty, which is built on top of Nginx), but when coupled with mod_md Apache makes for a great reverse proxy/ingress for my personal needs.

The benefit here is that I don't need 10 different implementations for each service/back end language that's used, I can outsource the heavy lifting to mod_auth_openidc (protected paths, needed roles/permissions, redirect URLs, token renewal and other things) and just read a few trusted headers behind the reverse proxy if further checks are needed, which is easy in all technologies.

That said, the configuration there is also hard and annoying to do, as is working with OpenID Connect in general, even though you can kind of understand why that complexity is inherent. Here's a link with some certified implementations, by the way: https://openid.net/developers/certified-openid-connect-imple...

You couldn't pay me to use their bullshit...if you need an identity server/provider go with Keycloak. Open source, free, and standards based, works better and scales better too.