Keycloak is a high performance Java-based identity and access management solution. It lets developers add an authentication layer to their applications with minimum effort.

Azure-ready Charts with Containers from marketplace.azurecr.io

This Helm Chart has been configured to pull the Container Images from the Azure Marketplace Public Repository. The following command allows you to download and install all the charts from this repository.

$ helm repo add bitnami-azure https://marketplace.azurecr.io/helm/v1/repo

TL;DR

  helm repo add bitnami-azure https://marketplace.azurecr.io/helm/v1/repo
  helm install my-release bitnami-azure/keycloak

Introduction

Bitnami charts for Helm are carefully engineered, actively maintained and are the quickest and easiest way to deploy containers on a Kubernetes cluster that are ready to handle production workloads.

This chart bootstraps a Keycloak deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

Bitnami charts can be used with Kubeapps for deployment and management of Helm Charts in clusters. This Helm chart has been tested on top of Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR). Deploy BKPR to get automated TLS certificates, logging and monitoring for your applications.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.12+
• Helm 3.1.0

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm repo add bitnami-azure https://marketplace.azurecr.io/helm/v1/repo
$ helm install my-release bitnami-azure/keycloak

These commands deploy a Keycloak application on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Parameters

The following tables lists the configurable parameters of the Keycloak chart and their default values per section/component:

Global parameters

Common parameters

Keycloak parameters

keycloak-config-cli parameters

Keycloak deployment/statefulset parameters

Exposure parameters

RBAC parameters

Other parameters

Metrics parameters

Database parameters

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

helm install my-release --set auth.adminPassword=secretpassword bitnami-azure/keycloak

The above command sets the Keycloak administrator password to secretpassword.

NOTE: Once this chart is deployed, it is not possible to change the application’s access credentials, such as usernames or passwords, using Helm. To change these application credentials after deployment, delete any persistent volumes (PVs) used by the chart and re-deploy it, or use the application’s built-in administrative tools if available.

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install my-release -f values.yaml bitnami-azure/keycloak

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Configuration and installation details

Rolling VS Immutable tags

It is strongly recommended to use immutable tags in a production environment. This ensures your deployment does not change automatically if the same tag is updated with a different image.

Bitnami will release a new chart updating its containers if a new version of the main container, significant changes, or critical vulnerabilities exist.

Using an external database

Sometimes you may want to have Keycloak connect to an external database rather than installing one inside your cluster, e.g. to use a managed database service, or use run a single database server for all your applications. To do this, the chart allows you to specify credentials for an external database under the externalDatabase parameter. You should also disable the PostgreSQL installation with the postgresql.enabled option. For example with the following parameters:

postgresql.enabled=false
externalDatabase.host=myexternalhost
externalDatabase.port=5432
externalDatabase.user=myuser
externalDatabase.password=mypassword
externalDatabase.database=mydatabase

Note also that if you disable PostgreSQL per above you MUST supply values for the externalDatabase connection.

Adding extra environment variables

In case you want to add extra environment variables (useful for advanced operations like custom init scripts), you can use the extraEnvVars property.

extraEnvVars:
  - name: KEYCLOAK_LOG_LEVEL
    value: DEBUG

Alternatively, you can use a ConfigMap or a Secret with the environment variables. To do so, use the extraEnvVarsCM or the extraEnvVarsSecret values.

Sidecars and Init Containers

If you have a need for additional containers to run within the same pod as the Keycloak app (e.g. an additional metrics or logging exporter), you can do so via the sidecars config parameter. Simply define your container according to the Kubernetes container spec.

sidecars:
  - name: your-image-name
    image: your-image
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    ports:
      - name: portname
       containerPort: 1234

Similarly, you can add extra init containers using the initContainers parameter.

initContainers:
  - name: your-image-name
    image: your-image
    imagePullPolicy: Always
    ports:
      - name: portname
        containerPort: 1234

Initialize a fresh instance

The Bitnami Keycloak image allows you to use your custom scripts to initialize a fresh instance. In order to execute the scripts, you can specify custom scripts using the initdbScripts parameter as dict.

In addition to this option, you can also set an external ConfigMap with all the initialization scripts. This is done by setting the initdbScriptsConfigMap parameter. Note that this will override the previous option.

The allowed extensions is .sh.

Deploying extra resources

There are cases where you may want to deploy extra objects, such a ConfigMap containing your app’s configuration or some extra deployment with a micro service used by your app. For covering this case, the chart allows adding the full specification of other objects using the extraDeploy parameter.

Setting Pod’s affinity

This chart allows you to set your custom affinity using the affinity parameter. Find more information about Pod’s affinity in the kubernetes documentation.

As an alternative, you can use of the preset configurations for pod affinity, pod anti-affinity, and node affinity available at the bitnami/common chart. To do so, set the podAffinityPreset, podAntiAffinityPreset, or nodeAffinityPreset parameters.

Ingress

This chart provides support for ingress resources. If you have an ingress controller installed on your cluster, such as nginx-ingress-controller or contour you can utilize the ingress controller to serve your application.

To enable ingress integration, please set ingress.enabled to true.

Hosts

Most likely you will only want to have one hostname that maps to this Keycloak installation. If that’s your case, the property ingress.hostname will set it. However, it is possible to have more than one host. To facilitate this, the ingress.extraHosts object can be specified as an array. You can also use ingress.extraTLS to add the TLS configuration for extra hosts.

For each host indicated at ingress.extraHosts, please indicate a name, path, and any annotations that you may want the ingress controller to know about.

For annotations, please see this document. Not all annotations are supported by all ingress controllers, but this document does a good job of indicating which annotation is supported by many popular ingress controllers.

TLS Secrets

This chart will facilitate the creation of TLS secrets for use with the ingress controller, however, this is not required. There are three common use cases:

• Helm generates/manages certificate secrets.
• User generates/manages certificates separately.
• An additional tool (like cert-manager) manages the secrets for the application.

In the first two cases, it’s needed a certificate and a key. We would expect them to look like this:

• certificate files should look like (and there can be more than one certificate if there is a certificate chain)

  -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
  MIID6TCCAtGgAwIBAgIJAIaCwivkeB5EMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBCwUAMFYxCzAJBgNV
  ...
  jScrvkiBO65F46KioCL9h5tDvomdU1aqpI/CBzhvZn1c0ZTf87tGQR8NK7v7
  -----END CERTIFICATE-----
  

• keys should look like:

  -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
  MIIEogIBAAKCAQEAvLYcyu8f3skuRyUgeeNpeDvYBCDcgq+LsWap6zbX5f8oLqp4
  ...
  wrj2wDbCDCFmfqnSJ+dKI3vFLlEz44sAV8jX/kd4Y6ZTQhlLbYc=
  -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
  

If you are going to use Helm to manage the certificates, please copy these values into the certificate and key values for a given ingress.secrets entry.

If you are going to manage TLS secrets outside of Helm, please know that you can create a TLS secret (named keycloak.local-tls for example).

Secrets and passwords

This chart provides several ways to manage passwords:

• Values passed to the chart
• An existing secret with all the passwords
• Passwords present among several secrets

In the first case, a new Secret including all the passwords will be created during the chart installation. When upgrading it is necessary to provide the secrets using the --set option as shown below: For example:

  $ helm upgrade keycloak bitnami-azure/keycloak \
      --set auth.adminPassword=$KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD \
      --set auth.managementPassword=$KEYCLOAK_MANAGEMENT_PASSWORD \
      --set postgresql.postgresqlPassword=$POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD \
      --set postgresql.persistence.existingClaim=$POSTGRESQL_PVC

When installing using an existing secret, passwords can be stored in single secret or separeted into differect secrets.

To use a single existing secret existingSecret can be configured at values.yaml:

    existingSecret:
      name: mySecret
      keyMapping:
        admin-password: myPasswordKey
        management-password: myManagementPasswordKey
        database-password: myDatabasePasswordKey
        tls-keystore-password: myTlsKeystorePasswordKey
        tls-truststore-password: myTlsTruststorePasswordKey

The keyMapping links the passwords in the chart with the passwords stored in the existing Secret.

Configuring multiple existing secrets can be done by using auth.existingSecretPerPassword instead:

      existingSecretPerPassword:
        keyMapping:
          adminPassword: KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD
          managementPassword: KEYCLOAK_MANAGEMENT_PASSWORD
          databasePassword: password
          tlsKeystorePassword: JKS_KEYSTORE_TRUSTSTORE_PASSWORD
          tlsTruststorePassword: JKS_KEYSTORE_TRUSTSTORE_PASSWORD
        adminPassword:
          name: mySecret
        managementPassword:
          name: mySecret
        databasePassword:
          name: myOtherSecret
        tlsKeystorePassword:
          name: mySecret
        tlsTruststorePassword:
          name: mySecret

Additionally to the key mapping, a different Secret name can be configured per password.

NOTE: ‘auth.existingSecretPerPassword’ will overwrite the configuration at ‘auth.existingSecret’

Troubleshooting

Find more information about how to deal with common errors related to Bitnami’s Helm charts in this troubleshooting guide.

Upgrading

To 1.0.0

On November 13, 2020, Helm v2 support was formally finished, this major version is the result of the required changes applied to the Helm Chart to be able to incorporate the different features added in Helm v3 and to be consistent with the Helm project itself regarding the Helm v2 EOL.

What changes were introduced in this major version?

• Previous versions of this Helm Chart use apiVersion: v1 (installable by both Helm 2 and 3), this Helm Chart was updated to apiVersion: v2 (installable by Helm 3 only). Here you can find more information about the apiVersion field.
• Move dependency information from the requirements.yaml to the Chart.yaml
• After running helm dependency update, a Chart.lock file is generated containing the same structure used in the previous requirements.lock
• The different fields present in the Chart.yaml file has been ordered alphabetically in a homogeneous way for all the Bitnami Helm Charts
• This chart depends on the PostgreSQL 10 instead of PostgreSQL 9. Apart from the same changes that are described in this section, there are also other major changes due to the master/slave nomenclature was replaced by primary/readReplica. Here you can find more information about the changes introduced.

Considerations when upgrading to this version

• If you want to upgrade to this version using Helm v2, this scenario is not supported as this version doesn’t support Helm v2 anymore
• If you installed the previous version with Helm v2 and wants to upgrade to this version with Helm v3, please refer to the official Helm documentation about migrating from Helm v2 to v3
• If you want to upgrade to this version from a previous one installed with Helm v3, it should be done reusing the PVC used to hold the PostgreSQL data on your previous release. To do so, follow the instructions below (the following example assumes that the release name is keycloak):

NOTE: Please, create a backup of your database before running any of those actions.

Export secrets and required values to update

$ export KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret --namespace default keycloak-env-vars -o jsonpath="{.data.KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD}" | base64 --decode)
$ export KEYCLOAK_MANAGEMENT_PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret --namespace default keycloak-env-vars -o jsonpath="{.data.KEYCLOAK_MANAGEMENT_PASSWORD}" | base64 --decode)
$ export POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret --namespace default keycloak-postgresql -o jsonpath="{.data.postgresql-password}" | base64 --decode)
$ export POSTGRESQL_PVC=$(kubectl get pvc -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=keycloak,app.kubernetes.io/name=postgresql,role=master -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")

Delete statefulsets

Delete PostgreSQL statefulset. Notice the option --cascade=false:

$ kubectl delete statefulsets.apps keycloak-postgresql --cascade=false

Upgrade the chart release

$ helm upgrade keycloak bitnami-azure/keycloak \
    --set auth.adminPassword=$KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD \
    --set auth.managementPassword=$KEYCLOAK_MANAGEMENT_PASSWORD \
    --set postgresql.postgresqlPassword=$POSTGRESQL_PASSWORD \
    --set postgresql.persistence.existingClaim=$POSTGRESQL_PVC

Force new statefulset to create a new pod for postgresql

$ kubectl delete pod keycloak-postgresql-0

Finally, you should see the lines below in MariaDB container logs:

$ kubectl logs $(kubectl get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=postgresql,app.kubernetes.io/name=postgresql,role=primary -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
...
postgresql 08:05:12.59 INFO  ==> Deploying PostgreSQL with persisted data...
...

Useful links

• https://docs.bitnami.com/tutorials/resolve-helm2-helm3-post-migration-issues/
• https://helm.sh/docs/topics/v2_v3_migration/
• https://helm.sh/blog/migrate-from-helm-v2-to-helm-v3/