~ Offloading authentication and user management to Keycloak - A minimal example with Nuxt and Litestar

At the Ghent Center for Digital Humanities we provide software services for researchers. Think about, for example, annotation platforms for ancient texts or collaborative databases with geographically referenced historical data. Each of those services need some kind of authentication and user management: some parts of the service might be public, some only accessible for researchers at Ghent University and other parts need to be accessible e.g. to external researchers or collaborators. Providing authentication, login-flows and user management for each and every service quickly becomes tedious and, frankly, boring.

We went looking for a solution and stumbled on Keycloak. Keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management system and is able to either authenticate users itself or pass through authenticate to other authentication providers like LDAP, GitHub, OAuth accounts, or others. It avoids the need to setup application-specific user management system. Flows like ‘forget password’, ‘verify email’, ‘two factor authentication’ are not part of your application itself but are provided by Keycloak. Leaving the developer to focus on application specific tasks.

Integration with Keycloak is a bit of work and not straightforward. As part of trying out Keycloak I have created a minimal working example of a front-end / back-end system which uses Keycloak for authentication. To get full access to the back-end API the user first needs a valid JWT-token provided by Keycloak. The flow can be seen in the video above. The dockerized environment can perhaps serve as inspiration for similar setups. Please do try out the dockerized minimal working example and see if Keycloak can fit your use-case.

UGent