Working with themes

Understand how to create and configure themes.

Keycloak provides theme support for web pages and emails. This allows customizing the look and feel of end-user facing pages so they can be integrated with your applications.

login sunrise
Login page with sunrise example theme

Theme types

A theme can provide one or more types to customize different aspects of Keycloak. The types available are:

  • Account - Account Console

  • Admin - Admin Console

  • Email - Emails

  • Login - Login forms

  • Welcome - Welcome page

Configuring a theme

All theme types, except welcome, are configured through the Admin Console.

Procedure

  1. Log into the Admin Console.

  2. Select your realm from the drop-down box in the top left corner.

  3. Click Realm Settings from the menu.

  4. Click the Themes tab.

    To set the theme for the master Admin Console you need to set the Admin Console theme for the master realm.

  5. To see the changes to the Admin Console refresh the page.

  6. Change the welcome theme by using the spi-theme—​welcome-theme option.

  7. For example:

    bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --spi-theme--welcome-theme=custom-theme

Default themes

Keycloak comes bundled with default themes in the JAR file keycloak-themes-{project_versionMvn}.jar inside the server distribution. The server’s root themes directory does not contain any themes by default, but it contains a README file with some additional details about the default themes. To simplify upgrading, do not edit the bundled themes directly. Instead create your own theme that extends one of the bundled themes.

Creating a theme

A theme consists of:

Unless you plan to replace every single page you should extend another theme. Most likely you will want to extend some existing theme. Alternatively, if you intend to provide your own implementation of the admin or account console, consider extending the base theme. The base theme consists of a message bundle and therefore such implementation needs to start from scratch, including implementation of the main index.ftl Freemarker template, but it can leverage existing translations from the message bundle.

When extending a theme you can override individual resources (templates, stylesheets, etc.). If you decide to override HTML templates bear in mind that you may need to update your custom template when upgrading to a new release.

While creating a theme it’s a good idea to disable caching as this makes it possible to edit theme resources directly from the themes directory without restarting Keycloak.

Procedure

  1. Run Keycloak with the following options:

    bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --spi-theme-static-max-age=-1 --spi-theme-cache-themes=false --spi-theme--cache-templates=false

  2. Create a directory in the themes directory.

    The name of the directory becomes the name of the theme. For example to create a theme called mytheme create the directory themes/mytheme.

  3. Inside the theme directory, create a directory for each of the types your theme is going to provide.

    For example, to add the login type to the mytheme theme, create the directory themes/mytheme/login.

  4. For each type create a file theme.properties which allows setting some configuration for the theme.

    For example, to configure the theme themes/mytheme/login to extend the base theme and import some common resources, create the file themes/mytheme/login/theme.properties with following contents:

    parent=base
import=common/keycloak

    You have now created a theme with support for the login type.

  5. Log into the Admin Console to check out your new theme

  6. Select your realm

  7. Click Realm Settings from the menu.

  8. Click on the Themes tab.

  9. For Login Theme select mytheme and click Save.

  10. Open the login page for the realm.

    You can do this either by logging in through your application or by opening the Account Console (/realms/{realm-name}/account).

  11. To see the effect of changing the parent theme, set parent=keycloak in theme.properties and refresh the login page.

Be sure to re-enable caching in production as it will significantly impact performance.

If you want to manually delete the content of the themes cache, you can do so by deleting the data/tmp/kc-gzip-cache directory of the server distribution. It can be useful for instance if you redeployed custom providers or custom themes without disabling themes caching in the previous server executions.

Theme properties

Theme properties are set in the file <THEME TYPE>/theme.properties in the theme directory.

  • parent - Parent theme to extend

  • import - Import resources from another theme

  • common - Override the common resource path. The default value is common/keycloak when not specified. This value would be used as value of suffix of ${url.resourcesCommonPath}, which is used typically in freemarker templates (prefix of ${url.resoucesCommonPath} value is theme root uri).

  • styles - Space-separated list of styles to include

  • locales - Comma-separated list of supported locales

There are a list of properties that can be used to change the css class used for certain element types. For a list of these properties look at the theme.properties file in the corresponding type of the keycloak theme (themes/keycloak/<THEME TYPE>/theme.properties).

You can also add your own custom properties and use them from custom templates.

When doing so, you can substitute system properties or environment variables by using these formats:

  • ${some.system.property} - for system properties

  • ${env.ENV_VAR} - for environment variables.

A default value can also be provided in case the system property or the environment variable is not found with ${foo\:defaultValue}.

If no default value is provided and there’s no corresponding system property or environment variable, then nothing is replaced and you end up with the format in your template.

Here’s an example of what is possible:

javaVersion=${java.version}

unixHome=${env.HOME:Unix home not found}
windowsHome=${env.HOMEPATH:Windows home not found}

Add a stylesheet to a theme

You can add one or more stylesheets to a theme.

Procedure

  1. Create a file in the <THEME TYPE>/resources/css directory of your theme.

  2. Add this file to the styles property in theme.properties.

    For example, to add styles.css to the mytheme, create themes/mytheme/login/resources/css/styles.css with the following content:

    .login-pf body {
    background: DimGrey none;
}

  3. Edit themes/mytheme/login/theme.properties and add:

    styles=css/styles.css

  4. To see the changes, open the login page for your realm.

    You will notice that the only styles being applied are those from your custom stylesheet.

  5. To include the styles from the parent theme, load the styles from that theme. Edit themes/mytheme/login/theme.properties and change styles to:

    styles=css/login.css css/styles.css
    To override styles from the parent stylesheets, ensure that your stylesheet is listed last.

Adding a script to a theme

You can add one or more scripts to a theme.

Procedure

  1. Create a file in the <THEME TYPE>/resources/js directory of your theme.

  2. Add the file to the scripts property in theme.properties.

    For example, to add script.js to the mytheme, create themes/mytheme/login/resources/js/script.js with the following content:

    alert('Hello');

    Then edit themes/mytheme/login/theme.properties and add:

    scripts=js/script.js

Adding an image to a theme

To make images available to the theme add them to the <THEME TYPE>/resources/img directory of your theme. These can be used from within stylesheets or directly in HTML templates.

For example to add an image to the mytheme copy an image to themes/mytheme/login/resources/img/image.jpg.

You can then use this image from within a custom stylesheet with:

body {
    background-image: url('../img/image.jpg');
    background-size: cover;
}

Or to use directly in HTML templates add the following to a custom HTML template:

<img src="${url.resourcesPath}/img/image.jpg" alt="My image description">

Adding a custom footer to a login theme

In order to use a custom footer, create a footer.ftl file in your custom login theme with the desired content.

An example for a custom footer.ftl may look like this:

Adding an image to an email theme

To make images available to the theme add them to the <THEME TYPE>/email/resources/img directory of your theme. These can be used from within directly in HTML templates.

For example to add an image to the mytheme copy an image to themes/mytheme/email/resources/img/logo.jpg.

To use directly in HTML templates add the following to a custom HTML template:

<img src="${url.resourcesUrl}/img/image.jpg" alt="My image description">

Adding custom Identity Providers icons

Keycloak supports adding icons for custom Identity providers, which are displayed on the login screen.

Procedure

  1. Define icon classes in your login theme.properties file (for example, themes/mytheme/login/theme.properties) with key pattern kcLogoIdP-<alias>.

  2. For an Identity Provider with an alias myProvider, you may add a line to theme.properties file of your custom theme. For example:

    kcLogoIdP-myProvider = fa fa-lock

All icons are available on the official website of PatternFly4. Icons for social providers are already defined in base login theme properties (themes/keycloak/login/theme.properties), where you can inspire yourself.

Creating a custom HTML template

Keycloak uses Apache Freemarker templates to generate HTML and render pages.

Although it is possible to create custom templates to change completely how pages are rendered, the recommendation is to leverage the built-in templates as much as possible. The reasons are:

  • During upgrades, you might be forced to update your custom templates to get the latest updates from newer versions

  • Configuring CSS styles to your themes allows you to adapt the UI to match your UI design standards and guidelines.

  • User Profile allows you to support custom user attributes and configure how they are rendered.

In most cases, you won’t need to change templates to adapt Keycloak to your needs, but you can override individual templates in your own theme by creating <THEME TYPE>/<TEMPLATE>.ftl. Admin and account console use a single template index.ftl for rendering the application.

For a list of templates in other theme types look at the theme/base/<THEME_TYPE> directory in the JAR file at $KEYCLOAK_HOME/lib/lib/main/org.keycloak.keycloak-themes-<VERSION>.jar.

Procedure

  1. Copy the template from the base theme to your own theme.

  2. Apply the modifications you need.

    For example, to create a custom login form for the mytheme theme, copy themes/base/login/login.ftl to themes/mytheme/login and open it in an editor.

    After the first line (<#import …​>), add <h1>HELLO WORLD!</h1> as shown here:

    <#import "template.ftl" as layout>
<h1>HELLO WORLD!</h1>
...

  3. Back up the modified template. When upgrading to a new version of Keycloak you may need to update your custom templates to apply changes to the original template if applicable.

Additional resources

Emails

To edit the subject and contents for emails, for example password recovery email, add a message bundle to the email type of your theme. There are three messages for each email. One for the subject, one for the plain text body and one for the html body.

To see all emails available take a look at themes/base/email/messages/messages_en.properties.

For example to change the password recovery email for the mytheme theme create themes/mytheme/email/messages/messages_en.properties with the following content:

passwordResetSubject=My password recovery
passwordResetBody=Reset password link: {0}
passwordResetBodyHtml=<a href="{0}">Reset password</a>

Deploying themes

Themes can be deployed to Keycloak by copying the theme directory to themes or it can be deployed as an archive. During development you can copy the theme to the themes directory, but in production you may want to consider using an archive. An archive makes it simpler to have a versioned copy of the theme, especially when you have multiple instances of Keycloak for example with clustering.

Procedure

  1. To deploy a theme as an archive, create a JAR archive with the theme resources.

  2. Add a file META-INF/keycloak-themes.json to the archive that lists the available themes in the archive as well as what types each theme provides.

    For example for the mytheme theme create mytheme.jar with the contents:

    • META-INF/keycloak-themes.json

    • theme/mytheme/login/theme.properties

    • theme/mytheme/login/login.ftl

    • theme/mytheme/login/resources/css/styles.css

    • theme/mytheme/login/resources/img/image.png

    • theme/mytheme/login/messages/messages_en.properties

    • theme/mytheme/email/messages/messages_en.properties

      The contents of META-INF/keycloak-themes.json in this case would be:

      {
    "themes": [{
        "name" : "mytheme",
        "types": [ "login", "email" ]
    }]
}

      A single archive can contain multiple themes and each theme can support one or more types.

To deploy the archive to Keycloak, add it to the providers/ directory of Keycloak and restart the server if it is already running.

Dark Mode

Dark mode is a feature that changes the color scheme to a dark background with lighter text. For example, themes based on PatternFly, such as Keycloak’s admin console and account console, support dark mode. But for some themes, dark mode doesn’t work well for various reasons. So Keycloak allows you to disable dark mode from the admin console.

Procedure to disable dark mode

  1. Log into the Admin Console.

  2. Select your realm.

  3. Click Realm Settings from the menu.

  4. Click on the Themes tab.

  5. Unselect Dark mode and click Save.

If enabled, the dark variant of the theme will be applied based on user preference through an operating system setting (e.g. light or dark mode) or a user agent setting. If disabled, only the light variant will be used. This setting only applies to themes that support dark and light variants. On themes that do not support this feature it will have no effect.

Additional resources for Themes

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