spring-authorization-server VS Keycloak

I use this https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-authorization-server for smaller projects or experimentations. Keeps all the moving parts without going to a 3rd party.

In this section we will use Spring Authorization Server to build an authorization server.In addition, we will also customize the access_token and custom user information endpoints.

You can spin one up in Spring (Java) fairly quickly and boilerplate - Main page and Getting Started Guide.

Is Spring Authorization Server ready for production? Does it only use OAuth 2.1? We currently use `org.springframework.security.oauth.boot:spring-security-oauth2-autoconfigure` in our apps with OAuth2 JWT with grant types `password`, and `refresh_token`. If we update our authorization server with Spring Authorization Server, do we have to change all functionalities? Can we use OAuth2 or do we have to start using OAuth2.1?

At the moment of writing this it seems like the documentation is also in the early stages, although I wouldn't expect too much from the documentation later on either if it was to be judged by the docs for the rest of the spring security. You can find the official docs here.

Your example is pretty unconventional though — it seems like you're sort of rolling your own authorization server which will make things difficult. The project has been diligent about removing support for "issuing" JWTs and things like that. If you asked a maintainer about your current approach they'd probably point you to https://spring.io/projects/spring-authorization-server.

It has becone so boilerplate, Spring is actually helping Take a look at: Spring Auth Server

Spring Auth Server

Most of the time, and most examples, will be about using OAuth as a client. But in your case you want to have your own OAuth and Open ID server which will be federated with Facebook and Google. All that means is that you will then have an OAuth server that is also someone else's client, such that your apps authenticate with your server which then uses their servers to actually identify users. This will also come in handy later if you want to set up permissions and what not. Besides Keycloak you might want to look into WSO2 IS or Auth0. Keycloak and WSO2 IS can be run locally, while Auth0 is a cloud service. I'd go with either Keycloak or Auth0. If you go the Spring Authorization Server route, they rolled up an example of federation on the project's Github page. Oauth can be pretty complicated though so I'd suggest that you start off with a ready-made solution. If you stick to Spring Oauth2 Client and avoid things like using Keycloak's specific adapter, it should be easy enough to swap OAuth servers later on. Regarding SAML, I've never used it. I think OAuth is way more prevalent in web development. Here's a comparison, I found it informative. You mentioned tutorials... I bought this course on Udemy last year and it was pretty nice. I browsed some tutorials, and I think this is what you need if you go with Keycloak, assuming you're using Keycloak on the server. If you want to authenticate users on the frontend (running on the browser), you'll want a PKCE flow example.

Spring has an oauth2 authorization server that is currently in early release: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-authorization-serv...

I'm building something with it currently and it's quite nice, especially if you are already familiar with spring security. Documentation is quite sparse tho.

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.