Chainguard Image for keycloak

Minimalist Wolfi-based Keycloak image for identity and access management.

Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Download this Image

This image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/keycloak:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard registry.

Usage

Docker

Launch a development instance of Keycloak:

docker run --name local-keycloak -p 8080:8080 \
	-e KEYCLOAK_ADMIN=admin -e KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=change_me \
	cgr.dev/chainguard/keycloak:latest \
	start-dev

The Keycloak UI can be accessed via:

• http://localhost:8080/

To launch a production instance of Keycloak, refer to the examples in the following documentation, as this is dependent on environment-specific settings and customizations.

Kubernetes operator

To deploy Keycloak leveraging the Keycloak operator, refer to the documentation for our Keycloak operator image.

Customizing the image

Keycloak provides a mechanism to configure and customize the image. This process is outlined in the Keycloak image documentation.

There are subtle differences in the executable paths used in the Chainguard image. Below is the example copied from the documentation, updated with the correct paths:

FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/keycloak:latest as builder

# Enable health and metrics support
ENV KC_HEALTH_ENABLED=true
ENV KC_METRICS_ENABLED=true

# Configure a database vendor
ENV KC_DB=postgres

WORKDIR /usr/share/java/keycloak
# for demonstration purposes only, please make sure to use proper certificates in production instead
RUN keytool -genkeypair -storepass password -storetype PKCS12 -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -dname "CN=server" -alias server -ext "SAN:c=DNS:localhost,IP:127.0.0.1" -keystore conf/server.keystore
RUN /usr/share/java/keycloak/bin/kc.sh build

FROM cgr.dev/chainguard/keycloak:latest
COPY --from=builder /usr/share/java/keycloak/ /usr/share/java/keycloak/

# change these values to point to a running postgres instance
ENV KC_DB=postgres
ENV KC_DB_URL=<DBURL>
ENV KC_DB_USERNAME=<DBUSERNAME>
ENV KC_DB_PASSWORD=<DBPASSWORD>
ENV KC_HOSTNAME=localhost
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/share/java/keycloak/bin/kc.sh"]

Contact Support

If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.

What are Chainguard Images?

Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.

Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Images include:

• Minimal design, with no unnecessary software bloat
• Automated nightly builds to ensure Images are completely up-to-date and contain all available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs (software bills of materials) attesting the provenance of all artifacts within the Image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

-dev Variants

As mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev variant which does include a shell and package manager.

Although the -dev image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.

That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.