[keycloak-dev] Hacking Tips

In talking with Marko, I shared some of my hacking tips to aid with i18n/l10n development. But they are generally handy for easing all Keycloak development. Others might have other ways to improve on this stuff and make our lives easier? Here are mine: *Build server-dist without artifacts *I think Bill gets the credit for making this possible in WildFly. You can build it such that jars are not copied to the server. Instead, they are retrieved from your local maven repo. For Keycloak, you go to /distribution/server-dist/server-provisioning.xml and set copy-module-artifacts="false". Now when you compile any of Keycloak's java modules you just restart the server and see your changes. It would be nice if we could use a system property for this, but it looks like server-provisioning.xml doesn't support props for that attribute. Some day I'll fix it and submit a patch. Anyway, doing that and running mvn compile instead of mvn install brings the build time from 3 minutes to about 6 seconds. Only 6 seconds to build the whole server! I use Windows and Cygwin to do this automatically in a batch file: cd c:\GitHub\keycloak\distribution\server-dist call mvn clean sed -i 's/copy-module-artifacts="true"/copy-module-artifacts="false"/' server-provisioning.xml call mvn compile sed -i 's/copy-module-artifacts="false"/copy-module-artifacts="true"/' server-provisioning.xml *Let the the default theme point to your maven clone instead of /standalone/configuration/themes *You can tell Keycloak to load the default theme from your development environment. This is especially handy when you are working on HTML or JS files for Keycloak Admin Console. To do this, edit keycloak-server.json. Here is the batch file code I use to automate it: cd c:\GitHub\keycloak\distribution\server-dist\target\keycloak*\standalone\configuration sed -i 's,"dir": "${jboss.server.config.dir}/themes","dir": "/GitHub/keycloak/forms/common-themes/src/main/resources/theme",' keycloak-server.json Note: I had to use a comma for my sed delimiter instead of forward slash / *Turn off caching in your browser. *You need to turn off caching to see your HTML and JS changes as soon as you edit them. But it can be a pain to turn caching on and off. I found a nifty FireFox extension called "Cache Disabler" that puts a little button in my toolbar to enable/disable all caching.