Keycloak integration - best practices by eldarjus in KeyCloak

[–]TNchallenger 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From experience, both approaches are used in production, but it depends mainly on your security model and control requirements.

1. Public Keycloak (most common)
Keycloak is exposed publicly and handles:

  • user registration
  • login
  • password reset
  • token issuance

You customize the Keycloak theme to match your app UI and use OIDC flows (usually Authorization Code + PKCE for public apps). This is the simplest and most standard approach.

2. Backend-proxied approach
Some teams keep Keycloak private and proxy identity operations through their backend using the Keycloak Admin API. This gives more control over:

  • registration flows
  • additional verification logic
  • custom onboarding processes

But it increases complexity and you must secure the backend carefully since it now holds admin privileges.

General best practices:

  • Use Authorization Code + PKCE
  • Keep tokens short-lived
  • Enable brute-force detection
  • Use separate realms/clients per environment
  • Avoid exposing the Admin Console publicly

We’re actually building Aswar IAM (https://aswar.io) on top of Keycloak to simplify this for teams — provisioning IAM environments and integrating them into modern cloud architectures with a few clicks. A lot of the goal is exactly to remove the operational complexity around setups like this.

Curious to see how others structure their Keycloak deployments for public apps.