:rocket: Try it for free in the new Phase Two keycloak managed service. Go to Phase Two for more information.

Organizations for Keycloak

Single realm, multi-tenancy for SaaS apps

This project intends to provide a range of Keycloak extensions focused on solving several of the common use cases of multi-tenant SaaS applications that Keycloak does not solve out of the box.

The extensions herein are used in the Phase Two cloud offering, and are released here as part of its commitment to making its core extensions open source. Please consult the license for information regarding use.

:exclamation: See our note regarding Keycloak's upcoming organizations feature.

Organizations for Keycloak

Overview

If you search for "multi-tenant Keycloak", you'll find several opinionated approaches, each promising, and each with their own trade-offs. This project represents one such approach. It was built initially for a multi-tenant, public cloud, SaaS application. It has now been, in the form of the Phase Two cloud offering, adopted by several other companies for the same purpose.

Other approaches that we tried and decided against were:

One Realm for each tenant
Using existing Keycloak Groups to model Organizations, Roles and Memberships

But each of these approaches had trade-offs of scale or frailty we found undesirable or unacceptable to meet our requirements. Instead, we opted to make Organizations, and their Invitations, Roles and Memberships first-class entities in Keycloak.

We recently did a presentation at Keycloak DevDay 2024 on the features of the keycloak-orgs extension. Watch the full video for an introduction and more information about what is possible

Definitions

Organizations are "tenants" or "customers" as commonly used. A Realm can have multiple Organizations.
Memberships are the relationship of Users to Organizations. Users may be members of multiple Organizations.
Roles are mechanisms of role-based security specific to an Organization, much like Keycloak Realm Roles and Client Roles. In addition to a set of standard roles related to Organization data visibility and management, administrators can create Roles unique to an organization. Users who are Members of Organizations can be granted that Organization's Roles.
Invitations allow Users and non-Users to be invited to join an Organization. Invitations can be created by administrators or Organization members with permission.
Domains are email domains that are used to automatically select Organization IdPs using the optional authenticators. Included is a facility to validate customer domain ownership using DNS records.

Quick start

The easiest way to get started is our Docker image. Documentation and examples for using it are in the phasetwo-containers repo. The most recent version of this extension is included.

Building and testing

Checkout this project and run mvn clean install, which will build the source, run all unit/integration tests, and produce a jar in the target/ directory.

Cypress tests

For more information you can refer to cypress-tests.

Installation

The maven build only produces a jar of the code here, and some additional libraries are necessary when using this library. If you are intending to use this library outside of the Phase Two Docker image, please consult the pom.xml file in the phasetwo-containers repo for more information on what is required. Furthermore, there are some uses of the keycloak-admin-client by this library. Because of the way Quarkus does augmentation of this dependency, it is necessary to include this when building Keycloak itself. Our image has these changes, but they will never be included in the default Keycloak image. We encourage you to either use our base Docker image that includes this, or see the pom.xml diffs for an example of how to do it yourself.

During the first run, some initial migrations steps will occur:

Database migrations will be run to add the tables for use by the JPA entities. These have been tested with SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, H2, and Postgres. Other database types may fail.
Initial realm-management client roles (view-organizations and manage-organizations) will be be added to each realm.

Admin UI

If you are using the extension as bundled in the Docker image or by building our Admin UI theme, you must take an additional step in order to show that theme. In the Admin Console UI, go to the Realm Settings -> Themes page and select phasetwo.v2. Then, the "Organizations" section will be available in the left navigation. Because of a quirk in Keycloak, if you are logging in to the master realm, the theme must be set in that realm, rather than the realm you wish to administer.

Compatibility

Although it has been developed and working since Keycloak 9.0.0, the extensions are currently known to work with Keycloak > 17.0.0. Other versions may work also. Additionally, because of the fast pace of breaking changes since Keycloak "X" (Quarkus version), we don't make any guaranteed that this will work with any version other than it is packaged with in the Docker image.

Extensions

Data

We've adopted a similar model that Keycloak uses for making the Organization data available to the application. There is a custom SPI that makes the OrganizationProvider available. The methods provided are:

  OrganizationModel createOrganization(
      RealmModel realm, String name, UserModel createdBy, boolean admin);

  OrganizationModel getOrganizationById(RealmModel realm, String id);

  Stream<OrganizationModel> searchForOrganizationStream(
      RealmModel realm,
      Map<String, String> attributes,
      Integer firstResult,
      Integer maxResults,
      Optional<UserModel> member);

  Long getOrganizationsCount(RealmModel realm, String search);

  boolean removeOrganization(RealmModel realm, String id);

  void removeOrganizations(RealmModel realm);

  Stream<OrganizationModel> getOrganizationsStreamForDomain(
      RealmModel realm, String domain, boolean verified);

  Stream<OrganizationModel> getUserOrganizationsStream(RealmModel realm, UserModel user);

  Stream<InvitationModel> getUserInvitationsStream(RealmModel realm, UserModel user);

Models

The OrganizationProvider returns model delegates that wrap the underlying entities and provide conveniences for working with the data. They are available in the io.phasetwo.service.model package.

Entities

There are JPA entities that represent the underlying tables that are available in the io.phasetwo.service.model.jpa.entity package. The providers and models are implemented using these entities in the io.phasetwo.service.model.jpa package.

Resources

A group of custom REST resources are made available for administrator and customer use and UI. Current documentation on the available resource methods is in this openapi.yaml specification file, and you can find browsable documentation on the Phase Two API site.

Organizations - CRUD Organizations
Memberships - CRUD and check User-Organization membership
Roles - CRUD Organization Roles and grant/revoke Roles to Users
Bulk Roles - support for bulk Roles resources
Identity Providers - A subset of the Keycloak IdP APIs that allows Organization administrators to manage their own IdP

Events

For more information you can refer to: Events

Import/Export organizations

For more information you can refer to: Import/Export

Mappers

There are currently two OIDC mapper that adds either Organization attributes or Organization membership and roles to the token. An example of the format of the membership addition to the token is:

  "organizations": {
    "5aeb9aeb-97a3-4deb-af9f-516615b59a2d" : {
      "name": "foo",
      "roles": [ "admin", "viewer" ]
    }
  }

You can configure the mapper, by going to Clients > your-client-name > Client scopes > your-client-name-dedicated and choosing to add a new mapper By configuration. Once selected, choose the Organization Role mapper from the list and specify the details like the following:

mapper

Authentication

Invitations

For most use cases, set the Invitation required action to Enabled in Authentication->Required Actions. It does not need to be set as a default. It will automatically check on each login if the user has outstanding Invitations to Organizations, and enable itself.

Install and enable Invitation Required Action

There are some non-standard flows where the required action does not do this detection. For these cases, there is a custom Authenticator you can add to a copy of the standard browser flow. Add the Invitation authenticator as a "REQUIRED" execution following the "Username Password Form" as a child of the forms group. Both the Required Action and the Authenticator check to see if the authenticated user has outstanding Invitations to Organizations, and then adds the Required Action that they must complete to accept or reject their Invitations following a successful authentication.

Note that it is a default to require that an email address be verified, as it would present a security issue to allow anyone who uses an email address to register to join an organization without verifying that the user is the owner of that email address. Because of that, it is assumed that you are using invitations in conjunction with setting Verify Email as a default Required Action.

IdP Discovery

Organizations may optionally be given permission to manage their own IdP. The custom resources that allow this write a configuration in the IdP entities that is compatible with a 3rd party extension that allows for IdP discovery based on email domain configured for the Organization. It works by writing the home.idp.discovery.orgs value into the config map for the IdP. Information on further configuration is available at sventorben/keycloak-home-idp-discovery. However, please note that the internal discovery portion has been forked from his version, and does not look up IdPs in the same way.

mapper

These are the configuration options for the "Home IdP Discovery" Authenticator. It will need to be placed in your flow as a replacement for a "Username form", or after another Authenticator/Form that sets the ATTEMPTED_USERNAME note.

Active Organization

It is possible to define an active organization and switch it. It's currently based on user's attribute and the active organization id, name, role or attribute can be mapped into tokens with a configurable mapper.
For more information you can refer to active-organization.

Global organization settings

In the Organizations tab it is possible to switch between two master configuration settings: "Create Admin User" and "Shared IDPs"

The Create Admin User setting controls the creation of the initial administrator when a new organization is created.
The Shared IDPs will give a keycloak admin user the possibility to control the assignment of a Keycloak identity provider in the context of multiple organization. If turned onthe same IDP can be shared between multiple organizations. If turned off a IDP can be assigned to one organization. Switching this setting from on to off will erase all the IDP settings the current organizations have.
These configs are persisted in the realm config under the flags _providerConfig.orgs.config.createAdminUser and _providerConfig.orgs.config.sharedIdps

Organizations shared IDPs

It is possible to share the same IDP between multiple organizations by switching on the Shared IDPs config.
This offers the possibility to login using the same IDP to different organizations by using the IdP Discovery method.
For a shared IdP if the Post login flow authentication flow is set to post org broker login the Add User to Org authenticator will add the new member to all organizations which contain the user email domain in their domains configuration list.

License

We’ve changed the license of our core extensions from the AGPL v3 to the Elastic License v2.

Our blog post on the subject https://phasetwo.io/blog/licensing-change/
An attempt at a clarification https://github.com/p2-inc/keycloak-orgs/issues/81#issuecomment-1554683102

p2-inc / keycloak-orgs

readme