[keycloak-dev] Preferred way to make KeyCloak custom changes

[Erik Mulder]

Thanks for your response!

Indeed we already did a proof of concept where we added a custom mapper
the way you described (didn't know it was 'protected' territory :). The
question is: do we have to override the file
'org.keycloak.protocol.ProtocolMapper' for this and add the new mapper
in the original project or is there another way where we don't need to
touch the original sources and keep all our changes in a separate
project? And how can we do it such that it stays easy to upgrade to
newer KeyCloak releases?

As for JPA: it would be easier to integrate with the existing JPA
project. Again we are wondering whether to start modifying original
sources (like persistence.xml) or try to 'externalize' our changes
somehow and integrate them using existing 'hooks' in the system or maybe
merge projects during build.

Maybe there is no good answer to this and we'll always be having some
manual merge pains when upgrading to new KeyCloak versions. We just
wanted to check if there are preferred ways to add functionality with
the least amount of impact on the original sources.


On 04/11/15 15:30, Bill Burke wrote:
> Custom mappers should be possible.  I didn't document it as I wasn't 
> sure if we wanted to make the SPI public.  Custom mappers should just 
> follow the Provider SPI and they will be picked up.  If you see the 
> META-INF/services/... file in the resources directory of the "services" 
> or "broker" modules you'll see how to set this up.
>
> As for extending the JPA datamodel, what you could do is write a new JPA 
> Connections Provider and plug that in.  See connections/jpa.  I'm not 
> sure how you would handle the liquibase db migration.
>
> On 11/4/2015 6:03 AM, Erik Mulder wrote:
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> Quick intro: I’m part of a development team in The Netherlands that is
>> building a company-wide SSO solution. We’ve chosen KeyCloak to realize
>> this and will use OpenID Connect to secure our REST services. It’s a
>> great product and seems to be the only one having both support for all
>> kinds of security standards and a model and GUI for users and roles.
>> Thanks for creating it! J
>>
>> (if this should be asked instead on the users mailing list, please
>> correct me and I’ll post it there)
>>
>> So far, so good, but we have some extra requirements that do not fit
>> into the base KeyCloak data model. See below for details if you’re
>> interested. My question is: what is the preferred way / best practice to
>> extend the functionality of KeyCloak while keeping the impact on the
>> original sources to a minimum? Of course we could just fork the most
>> recent version and start hacking away, but we’d like to be able to
>> upgrade to newer versions of KeyCloak without too much hassle.
>> Possibilities that we’ve come up with so far:
>>
>> 1.Create completely separate modules that will extend the functionality
>> the way we need.
>>
>> 2.Fork on Github, apply custom changes, and try to merge in updates from
>> the master / release branches / tags
>>
>> 3.Apply custom changes on KeyCloak artifacts using a Maven plugin, such
>> as Truezip
>> (http://www.mojohaus.org/truezip/truezip-maven-plugin/index.html) -
>> manipulate zip files by adding/removing/replacing or Shade
>> (http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-shade-plugin/) - combine multiple
>> jars to 1 'uber-jar' containing the contents of both and when
>> overlapping decide on conflicts through configuration.
>>
>> Of course number 1 is preferred, but I do not see how to add custom
>> mappers or JPA entities without making changes in the original module
>> files. The other options seem like valid alternatives, but maybe there
>> is better / standard way to do this. So any help / insight / shared
>> experience on this is much appreciated, thanks!
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Erik Mulder
>>
>> Senior Software Engineer
>>
>> Docdata Payments – NL
>>
>> P.S. Details on why we want to extend the KeyCloak data model: (any
>> feedback on the contents of this P.S. is also welcome!)
>>
>> Our clients are merchants that have several webshops. We manage their
>> online payments (shopping cart checkout). We want to be able to let a
>> merchant manage their own users and let a user have different roles for
>> different webshops within the same merchant. The overall possible roles
>> are fixed though, no specific roles per merchant. We could create a
>> separate realm for every merchant, but then we need to duplicate all
>> roles every time. Furthermore, in KeyCloak there is no concept of a role
>> within a certain context. This is very understandable, since every
>> situation has it’s own requirements. We did a proof of concept by adding
>> tables and entities for Merchant, UserMerchant, UserMerchantRole etc.
>> and adding a custom mapper that can put this information on the Access
>> token. Worked like a charm! But it does need some changes in the
>> KeyCloak modules and sources to work, hence the question above.
>>
>>
>>
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