Advanced configuration

This guide describes how to use Custom Resources (CRs) for advanced configuration of your Keycloak deployment.

Server configuration details

Many server options are exposed as first-class citizen fields in the Keycloak CR. The structure of the CR is based on the configuration structure of Keycloak. For example, to configure the https-port of the server, follow a similar pattern in the CR and use the httpsPort field. The following example is a complex server configuration; however, it illustrates the relationship between server options and the Keycloak CR:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  db:
    vendor: postgres
    usernameSecret:
      name: usernameSecret
      key: usernameSecretKey
    passwordSecret:
      name: passwordSecret
      key: passwordSecretKey
    host: host
    database: database
    port: 123
    schema: schema
    poolInitialSize: 1
    poolMinSize: 2
    poolMaxSize: 3
  http:
    httpEnabled: true
    httpPort: 8180
    httpsPort: 8543
    tlsSecret: my-tls-secret
  hostname:
    hostname: my-hostname
    admin: my-admin-hostname
    strict: false
    strictBackchannel: false
  features:
    enabled:
      - docker
      - authorization
    disabled:
      - admin
      - step-up-authentication
  transaction:
    xaEnabled: false

For a list of options, see the Keycloak CRD. For details on configuring options, see All configuration.

Additional options

Some expert server options are unavailable as dedicated fields in the Keycloak CR. The following are examples of omitted fields:

Fields that require deep understanding of the underlying Keycloak implementation
Fields that are not relevant to a Kubernetes environment
Fields for provider configuration because they are dynamic based on the used provider implementation

The additionalOptions field of the Keycloak CR enables Keycloak to accept any available configuration in the form of key-value pairs. You can use this field to include any option that is omitted in the Keycloak CR. For details on configuring options, see All configuration.

The values can be expressed as plain text strings or Secret object references as shown in this example:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  additionalOptions:
    - name: spi-connections-http-client-default-connection-pool-size
      secret: # Secret reference
        name: http-client-secret # name of the Secret
        key: poolSize # name of the Key in the Secret
    - name: spi-email-template-mycustomprovider-enabled
      value: true # plain text value

The name format of options defined in this way is identical to the key format of options specified in the configuration file. For details on various configuration formats, see Configuring Keycloak.

Secret References

Secret References are used by some dedicated options in the Keycloak CR, such as tlsSecret, or as a value in additionalOptions.

Similarly ConfigMap References are used by options such as the configMapFile.

When specifying a Secret or ConfigMap Reference, make sure that a Secret or ConfigMap containing the referenced keys is present in the same namespace as the CR referencing it.

The operator will poll approximately every minute for changes to referenced Secrets or ConfigMaps. When a meaningful change is detected, the Operator performs a rolling restart of the Keycloak Deployment to pick up the changes.

Unsupported features

The unsupported field of the CR contains highly experimental configuration options that are not completely tested and are Tech Preview.

Pod Template

The Pod Template is a raw API representation that is used for the Deployment Template. This field is a temporary workaround in case no supported field exists at the top level of the CR for your use case.

The Operator merges the fields of the provided template with the values generated by the Operator for the specific Deployment. With this feature, you have access to a high level of customizations. However, no guarantee exists that the Deployment will work as expected.

The following example illustrates injecting labels, annotations, volumes, and volume mounts:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  unsupported:
    podTemplate:
      metadata:
        labels:
          my-label: "keycloak"
      spec:
        containers:
          - volumeMounts:
              - name: test-volume
                mountPath: /mnt/test
        volumes:
          - name: test-volume
            secret:
              secretName: keycloak-additional-secret

Disabling required options

Keycloak and the Keycloak Operator provide the best production-ready experience with security in mind. However, during the development phase, you can disable key security features.

Specifically, you can disable the hostname and TLS as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  http:
    httpEnabled: true
  hostname:
    strict: false
    strictBackchannel: false

Resource requirements

The Keycloak CR allows specifying the resources options for managing compute resources for the Keycloak container. It provides the ability to request and limit resources independently for the main Keycloak deployment via the Keycloak CR, and for the realm import Job via the Realm Import CR.

When no values are specified, the default requests memory is set to 1700MiB, and the limits memory is set to 2GiB. These values were chosen based on a deeper analysis of Keycloak memory management.

If no values are specified in the Realm Import CR, it falls back to the values specified in the Keycloak CR, or to the defaults as defined above.

You can specify your custom values based on your requirements as follows:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  resources:
    requests:
      cpu: 1200m
      memory: 896Mi
    limits:
      cpu: 6
      memory: 3Gi

Moreover, the Keycloak container manages the heap size more effectively by providing relative values for the heap size. It is achieved by providing certain JVM options.

For more details, see Running Keycloak in a container.

Truststores

If you need to provide trusted certificates, the Keycloak CR provides a top level feature for configuring the server’s truststore as discussed in Configuring trusted certificates.

Use the truststores stanza of the Keycloak spec to specify Secrets containing PEM encoded files, or PKCS12 files with extension .p12 or .pfx, for example:

apiVersion: k8s.keycloak.org/v2alpha1
kind: Keycloak
metadata:
  name: example-kc
spec:
  ...
  truststores:
    my-truststore:
      secret:
        name: my-secret

Where the contents of my-secret could be a PEM file, for example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: my-secret
stringData:
  cert.pem: |
    -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
    ...

When running on a Kubernetes or OpenShift environment well-known locations of trusted certificates are included automatically. This includes /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt and the /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/service-ca.crt when present.