keycloak-config-cli VS dex

Most of the time nowadays, I prefer offloading this to an identity provider, using OpenID Connect or soon Federated Credential Management (FedCM), even if that means shipping an identity provider as part of the deliverables (I generally go with Keycloak, with keycloak-config-cli to provision its configuration). I'm obviously biased though as I work in IT services, developping software mainly for intranets/extranets, and companies now increasingly have their own identity providers or at a minimum have that in their roadmap. So YMMV.

> But it is painful share the setup with other engineers.

We used keycloak-config-cli [1] it compares a config file stripped of IDs to your Keycloak installation and makes the relevant updates through the REST API.

[1] https://github.com/adorsys/keycloak-config-cli

As far as I know, the state of the art is https://github.com/adorsys/keycloak-config-cli , but I haven't played with that yet. It seems to be a big improvement over other solutions, because it can update configurations and the configurations can be "clean".

One alternative is to use the admin APIs instead of the UI. You'd SSH into the host and then use curl or https://github.com/adorsys/keycloak-config-cli to configure keycloak. I use the keycloak-config-cli for my setup. It's both how I manage disaster recovery and make changes to configuration.

I'm not saying that keycloak is always easy to work with. The thing I found hardest to figure out was how to automate disaster recovery. I want to be able to rebuild my entire auth configuration from scratch including users, default passwords, oauth clients, JWT mappings, etc. The only way I found to do this was to use https://github.com/adorsys/keycloak-config-cli. tl;dr It uses the admin API to provision items. You can export a configured realm, manually tweak some parts of it like enter passwords and add users, and then run it against a keycloak instance to restore everything.

I've found this https://github.com/adorsys/keycloak-config-cli and it looks really promising. It can update the configs without a need to restart the whole keycloak instance.

If you do end up using a setup like this then I highly recommend that you look into https://github.com/adorsys/keycloak-config-cli. tl;dr You can export your realm configuration once set up and then use it to restore your system should you lose your keycloak data. It can also be used to provision users but you have to manually add them to the realm export because they are not included in an export for some reason. All the different objects it can manage are documented here: https://www.keycloak.org/docs-api/17.0/rest-api/index.html#_realmrepresentation.

Dex: https://dexidp.io

Recently I looked into having a relatively simple SSO setup for my homelab. My main objective is that I could easily login with Google or GitHub auth. At my previous job I used both JetBrains Hub [1] and Keycloak but I found both of them a bit of a PITA to setup.

JetBrains Hub was really, really easy to get going. As was my previous experience with them. The only thing that annoyed me was the lack of a latest tag on their Docker registry. Don't get me wrong, pinned versions are great, but for my personal use I mostly just want to update all my Docker containers in one go.

On the other hand I found Keycloak very cumbersome to get going. It was pretty easy in dev mode, but I stumbled to get it going in production. AFAIK it had something to do with the wildcard Let's Encrypt cert that I tried to use. But after a couple of hours, I just gave up.

I finally went with Dex [2]. I had previously put it off because of the lack of documentation, but in the end it was extremely easy to setup. It just required some basic YAML, a SQLite database and a (sub)domain. I combined Dex with the excellent OAuth2 Proxy and a custom Nginx (Proxy Manager) template for an easy two line SSO configuration on all of my internal services.

In addition to this setup, I also added Cloudflare Access and WAF outside of my home to add some security. I only want to add some CrowdSec to get a little more insights.

1. https://www.jetbrains.com/hub/

2. https://dexidp.io/

3. https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy

3. https://github.com/alex3305/unraid-docker-templates

Another great option is to use https://github.com/dexidp/dex in an authentication setup. In your app, you federate the authentication to dex using OAuth2. Dex then has a pluggable architecture with built-in connectors for many established identity providers using a variety of protocols: Among others OAuth2, SAML 2 but also GitHub, Google, Gitea and so forth.

dex is well-known: https://github.com/dexidp/dex

We used keycloak for openid identity provider as well. It is fine to setup keycloak once. But it is painful share the setup with other engineers.

For local development, we end up using dex (https://dexidp.io). When we need support group/role, we use dex and glauth(https://glauth.github.io). Both dex and glauth can be configured with yaml files. We just created a few yaml files and a docker compose file, every engineer can be brought up the whole environment in a few seconds.

Also https://www.authelia.com and https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik look pretty promising, if you need more advanced features from them.

I added it as an available option (flake) in Dex: https://github.com/dexidp/dex