Keycloak VS awesome-selfhosted

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.

#docker-compose.yml version: '3' volumes: postgres_data: driver: local services: postgres: container_name: postgres image: postgres:15-alpine restart: unless-stopped volumes: - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data - ./init/db:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/ command: postgres -c wal_level=logical ports: - '5433:5432' environment: POSTGRES_DB: ${POSTGRES_DB} POSTGRES_USER: ${POSTGRES_USER} POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD} hasura: container_name: hasura image: hasura/graphql-engine:v2.29.0 restart: unless-stopped depends_on: - postgres # - keycloak ports: - '6080:8080' volumes: - ./hasura/metadata:/hasura-metadata environment: ## postgres database to store Hasura metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_METADATA_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/hasura_metadata HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL: postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB} HASURA_GRAPHQL_LOG_LEVEL: warn ## enable the console served by server HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE: 'true' # set to "false" to disable console ## enable debugging mode. It is recommended to disable this in production HASURA_GRAPHQL_DEV_MODE: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLED_LOG_TYPES: startup, http-log, webhook-log, websocket-log, query-log ## enable jwt secret when keycloak realm is ready # HASURA_GRAPHQL_JWT_SECRET: '{ "type": "RS256", "jwk_url": "http://keycloak:8080/realms/development/protocol/openid-connect/certs" }' HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET: ${HASURA_GRAPHQL_ADMIN_SECRET} HASURA_GRAPHQL_UNAUTHORIZED_ROLE: anonymous HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_REMOTE_SCHEMA_PERMISSIONS: 'true' HASURA_GRAPHQL_MIGRATIONS_SERVER_TIMEOUT: 30 # To view tables in Postgres # pgweb: # container_name: pgweb # image: sosedoff/pgweb:latest # restart: unless-stopped # ports: # - '8081:8081' # environment: # - DATABASE_URL=postgres://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@postgres:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?sslmode=disable # depends_on: # - postgres keycloak: container_name: keycloak image: quay.io/keycloak/keycloak:22.0.5 command: ['start-dev'] # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # command: ['start-dev', '--import-realm'] environment: ## https://www.keycloak.org/server/all-config KEYCLOAK_ADMIN: admin KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD: password123 KC_DB: postgres KC_DB_PASSWORD: postgres_pass KC_DB_USERNAME: postgres KC_DB_SCHEMA: public KC_DB_URL: jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/keycloak_db KC_HOSTNAME: localhost ports: - 8090:8080 depends_on: - postgres # Uncomment following if you want to import realm configuration on start up # volumes: # - ./realm-export.json:/opt/keycloak/data/import/realm.json:ro

None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted , though imo any more attention on the self hosted scene is awesome. We're now self hosting everything at my co-op, and it's a dream. Saves us money, provides learning opportunities, potentially is getting us work (managed hosting providers asking if we can be a devshop for their clients, for example), and lets us give back to the FOSS community as we uncover bugs.

We use:

* Matrix / Synapse for comms (slack alternative) (managed hosting through etke.cc)

There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SE project guides you know?

This[1] seems like a well maintained repo.

And thank you for the pointers, we'll try to get ourselves added here :)

[1]: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

I've always felt like FOSS as a philosophy has been tangled up in trying to participate effectively in capitalism, when that was never really the point, nor really very possible unless you're lucky, nor really worth it. The origin of FOSS as I understand it from reading books like "Hackers" is from people that were mad that access was being restricted to systems and code from people that really wanted to use these systems and code, and hack them, and learn from them. I recall that one of the things Stallman likes to brag about from that time is not related to FOSS at all, but instead successfully decrypting a bunch of passwords, emailing the decrypted passwords to people, and recommending they instead set the password to an empty string instead. It was about keeping access to the system Free as in Beer.

I suppose some have argued that FOSS represents a Public Commons in the way that fields and wells and physical markets used to, but none of those things survived capitalism, so I don't see why a technological commons should be expected to either.

For me I've been thinking lately that perhaps those interested in FOSS should instead consider how we can use FOSS to detach ourselves from needing to participate in global capitalism at all. Is there FOSS technology we can use to liberate people from things they need to spend money on right now? An example could be the Global Village Construction Set: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ a set of open source designs for things like hydraulic motors or microcombines or steam engines that you can build on your own, usually not for cheap, but for far, far cheaper than you could buy from John Deere. Here's another cool project, some guy has just been building things like solar panels and basic circuit boards on his property from very base components for years: https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Some other FOSS liberation examples:

Combining a tool like Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, and etc, can liberate people from their 5 different media subscriptions. Or at least they can still buy DVDs and put them on Jellyfin to have the convenience of streaming with the media library of their own choosing.

Deploying Matrix or another FOSS communication tool can let organizations have enterprise-level communication software without paying HUGE seat-based license fees to corporations like Slack.

In fact there's many ways to liberate yourself from paid SaaS in this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted at my co-op we self-host and deploy all our services for this reason, it saves us a TON of money.

I don't have many other examples to mind because this is something I'm actively still researching. Friends in Venezuela though especially tell me how FOSS technology can liberate in ways I wouldn't expect here with my 64gb RAM machine with the latest processor, that I can easily replace components on on a whim. Such as how they can keep all their broken down machines pieced together from junkyards running pretty ok on various linux distros, and how they can sell creative work using free tools like gimp (no, really) or darktable. Like as not they'll just pirate software, though, but apparently FOSS often runs better on shitty hardware.

Anyway my long term plan is to find or build more and more things that let people just not spend money on things anymore. That could be by making it easier to not have to throw things away anymore, or building tools to replace proprietary ones, or, idk, other ways I haven't thought of.

Dashboard in what sense? Is this what you had in mind or no?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#per...

I often skim through various "awesome lists" (e.g. [1]) and communities interested in open source apps like r/selfhosted [2]

[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

1. https://nextcloud.com/ https://proton.me/drive https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#fil...

2. Download all data locally then upload elsewhere.

3. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-policy-faq#7.-How-...