In this article, you'll use Ansible to simplify and automate the installation of Keycloak, a popular open-source tool to implement single sign-on for Web applications.
The tutorial in this article builds on an Ansible Collection named middleware automation.
Keycloak, which has been specifically designed for this endeavor.
To make use of this tutorial, you need a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora system, along with version 2.9 or higher of Ansible.
Redhat csp: This collection allows Ansible to connect to the Red Hat Customer Portal to download Red Hat's single sign-on technology, which is a productized and supported version of Keycloak.
Wildfly: Keycloak runs on top of the Wildfly application server, including Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which is the version of Wildfly supported by Red Hat.
Depending on the configuration of the machine used as the Ansible controller, you might need to add some Python dependencies so that Ansible will have the libraries required to make use of the collection.
Thanks to the dedicated collection you just installed, automating the installation and configuration of Keycloak is easy.
Before you implement this inside your playbook, we should recap what we mean here by installing Keycloak.
The playbook begins by defining a variable for the Keycloak server administrative user.
Note that, because this variable is a password, it should really be secured using Ansible Vault or some other secrets management system.
The configuration then adds the Ansible collection for Keycloak to the list used by the playbook and adds the associated middleware automation.
Keycloak role to the list of roles that the playbook uses.
Ansible/collections/ansible collections/middleware automation/keycloak/roles/keycloak/tasks/restart keycloak.
Figure 1: The Keycloak administrative site should be running on your local computer.
To summarize, at the end of this playbook execution, you'll have a running systemd service managing an instance of Keycloak.
By using Ansible and the Ansible Collection for Keycloak as outlined in this article, you can fully automate the deployment of a single sign-on server.
In this article, Ansible has performed all the heavy lifting: downloading software, preparing the operating system, deploying the binary files and the configuration, setting up the service, and even preparing the required administrative account.
The Ansible Collection for Keycloak allows you to streamline the installation and configuration of Keycloak, thus enabling you to scale deployments as necessary and ensure repeatability across them all.
In an upcoming article, we'll discuss how to further automate Keycloak's single sign-on service by creating realms and their members using Ansible.
This Cyber News was published on feeds.dzone.com. Publication date: Mon, 11 Dec 2023 17:43:05 +0000