Improving developer and extension story in Keycloak

[stianst]

Description

Improving our developer and extension story

• Open up to modularise the Keycloak code base into a suite of extensions
• Make it easier to build custom extensions, including enabling community maintained extensions available in a “marketplace”

What is an extension?

• One or more providers
• A custom theme
• Custom theme resources
• Configuration
  ** Server-level configuration
  *** CLI options / environment variables
  ** Realm-level configuration
  *** Component model
• Third-party dependencies
• Enabling/requiring additional Quarkus extensions
• A GitHub repository, with GitHub Actions for testing, and GitHub releases for release artifacts to make it easy to install

• Compatibility Matrix (works with Keycloak Version X, X+1)

What can be improved

• New SPIs or improved APIs for existing SPIs to make it easier to develop extensions for specific use-cases
• Testing
• Packaging, including third-party dependencies
• Consistent and simplified installation of extensions
• Marketplace/visibility of extensions

What could a marketplace do?

• Not really a marketplace as it’s for free and open source extensions ;)
• Easy way to discover extensions, and provide consistent approach to testing, verifying with KC releases, showing what versions of an extension is compatible with a given KC release, how to install it, etc.
• Theme preview PoC (Stian) - PoC to demonstrate a easy way to preview custom themes

Discussion

None

Issues

No response

Motivation

No response

[thomasdarimont]

Adding to "What is an extension?":

• Could also provide new SPIs and referernce implementations
• Support Information (Vendor metadata, Vendor Link, Link to external documentation)
• Requirements: (Min Keycloak version, Feature state (enabled, disabled))

[thomasdarimont]

We should also provide something like a keycloak-platform-bom or an keycloak-extension-bom that references all libraries available within the Keycloak distribution for a particular version.

Developers who want to write an extension should only need two (currently fictional dependencies):

<dependencyManagement>
	<dependencies>
        <dependency>
<!-- provides the keycloak libraries for the given keycloak base -->
            <groupId>org.keycloak</groupId>
            <artifactId>keycloak-platform-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${keycloak.version}</version>
			<scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
	</dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

<dependencies>
        <dependency>
<!-- all APIs available for extension development -->
            <groupId>org.keycloak</groupId>
            <artifactId>keycloak-platform</artifactId>
            <version>${keycloak.version}</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>

<!-- if we had dedicated modules, users could declare a dependency to a specific module instead of refering to the keycloak-platform, e.g. oidc extensions -->
        <dependency>
<!-- all APIs within the oidc protocol context -->
            <groupId>org.keycloak</groupId>
            <artifactId>keycloak-oidc</artifactId>
            <version>${keycloak.version}</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
<!-- testing integration -> new test framework? -->
            <groupId>org.keycloak</groupId>
            <artifactId>keycloak-platform-test</artifactId>
            <version>${keycloak.version}</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
</dependencies>