Tailoring Keycloak: How to customise the authentication flow

At our Friday Talk, Nina Romanić, our software engineer, explored what happens when the default Keycloak authentication flow is insufficient for your unique requirements.

Nina demonstrated how to implement a customised authentication flow tailored to our specific needs.

Simplifying identity management with Keycloak

Keycloak is an open-source Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool that helps manage user authentication and access control for applications. It simplifies the process of logging users in and managing their identities by handling things like usernames, passwords, and sessions across multiple apps.

Keycloak fully supports OIDC and OAuth 2.0 as protocols for authentication and authorization. In short, Keycloak handles all the heavy lifting of login and identity management for our applications, so we don’t have to build our own implementations of OIDC and OAuth 2.0.

Keycloak provides built-in authentication flows that cover common user scenarios like registration, login, password recovery, and more.

Going beyond defaults: Custom SPI implementation

Keycloak’s built-in implementations are usually sufficient for our needs, as they already cover most common authentication scenarios. However, when specific requirements arise, Keycloak’s extensibility comes into play.

What is the SPI (Service Provider Interface) pattern, and how does it enable us to customize Keycloak extensively?

How can we implement a desired SPI, register it as a service provider, and tell Keycloak to use it?

If you are interested in this topic and would like to learn more about tailoring Keycloak, check out the materials of this insightful Friday Talk.

Also, follow our blog section for exciting upcoming topics that we’ll share soon.