Hey everyone! I'm curious—every time I try to set up Keycloak, I end up doing all this configuration from scratch, setting up realms, users, roles, and clients. It's a bit much for quick tests or demos. What do you guys think? Would having a cloud-based setup already pre-loaded with demo users and clients save you time? Or do you prefer to start fresh every single time?
5 Answers
I’m not sure about Keycloak specifically, but I usually have a demo realm set up for any authentication scenarios. Unless the user details change significantly, I just deploy a new version each time.
Self-hosting on a VPS is an option, and there's a guide that might help you get started. But I get that setting things up repetitively can be a pain.
When you say ‘ready to go,’ are you asking for a pre-configured instance? Keycloak does let you pass configuration info during startup if you export it from an existing setup. Are you setting it up manually each time?
I tried the import/export feature, but honestly, it’s not satisfying. It works for quick setups, but redoing everything when something changes is frustrating. However, you can use Terraform or Pulumi to set up Keycloak as infrastructure as code, which might make the process smoother.
You could always configure everything you want, export the realm, and create a Docker Compose file that imports it. But having to set everything up again just to test small things seems a bit tedious.
Exactly! By ‘ready to go,’ I mean having a hosted version with a demo realm and test users already in place. No Docker, no file setups, just jump in and start testing. Just thinking if this kind of quick setup could be really convenient.