keycloak-angular

What is keycloak-angular?

The keycloak-angular package is an Angular library that provides integration with Keycloak, an open-source identity and access management solution. It allows Angular applications to easily authenticate users and manage user sessions using Keycloak.

What are keycloak-angular's main functionalities?

User Authentication

This feature allows you to initialize Keycloak in your Angular application and enforce user authentication. The code sample demonstrates how to configure Keycloak with the server URL, realm, and client ID, and ensure that the user is logged in before accessing the application.

import { KeycloakService } from 'keycloak-angular';

constructor(private keycloakService: KeycloakService) {}

async ngOnInit() {
  await this.keycloakService.init({
    config: {
      url: 'https://keycloak-server/auth',
      realm: 'my-realm',
      clientId: 'my-client'
    },
    initOptions: {
      onLoad: 'login-required'
    }
  });
}

Role-Based Access Control

This feature enables role-based access control by checking if the authenticated user has a specific role. The code sample shows how to use the KeycloakService to verify if the user possesses a particular role, which can be used to control access to certain parts of the application.

import { KeycloakService } from 'keycloak-angular';

constructor(private keycloakService: KeycloakService) {}

hasRole(role: string): boolean {
  return this.keycloakService.isUserInRole(role);
}

Token Management

This feature provides token management capabilities, allowing you to retrieve the current user's authentication token. The code sample demonstrates how to use the KeycloakService to obtain the token, which can be used for making authenticated API requests.

import { KeycloakService } from 'keycloak-angular';

constructor(private keycloakService: KeycloakService) {}

async getToken(): Promise<string> {
  return await this.keycloakService.getToken();
}

Other packages similar to keycloak-angular

angular-oauth2-oidc

The angular-oauth2-oidc package is another popular library for implementing OAuth2 and OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication in Angular applications. It provides similar functionalities to keycloak-angular, such as user authentication and token management, but is more generic and can be used with any OAuth2/OIDC compliant identity provider, not just Keycloak.

oidc-client

The oidc-client package is a JavaScript library for managing OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication. While it is not specific to Angular, it can be integrated into Angular applications to handle authentication flows. Compared to keycloak-angular, oidc-client offers more flexibility in terms of identity provider support but requires more manual setup and integration.

README

Keycloak Angular

Easy Keycloak setup for Angular applications.

---

• About
• Installation
• Setup
• Example project
• AuthGuard
• HttpClient Interceptor
• Keycloak-js Events
• Contributors
• License

---

About

This library helps you to use keycloak-js in Angular applications providing the following features:

• A Keycloak Service which wraps the keycloak-js methods to be used in Angular, giving extra functionalities to the original functions and adding new methods to make it easier to be consumed by Angular applications.
• Generic AuthGuard implementation, so you can customize your own AuthGuard logic inheriting the authentication logic and the roles load.
• A HttpClient interceptor that adds the authorization header to all HttpClient requests. It is also possible to disable this interceptor or exclude routes from having the authorization header.
• This documentation also assists you to configure the keycloak in your Angular applications and with the client setup in the admin console of your keycloak installation.

Installation

Run the following command to install both Keycloak Angular and the official Keycloak client library:

npm install keycloak-angular keycloak-js

Note that keycloak-js is a peer dependency of Keycloak Angular. This change allows greater flexibility of choosing the right version of the Keycloak client version for your project.

Versions

Angular	keycloak-angular	keycloak-js	Support
13.x	9.x.x	10 - 16	Bugs / New Features
11.x - 12.x	8.4.0	10 - 15	None

Only the latest version of Angular in the table above is actively supported. This is due to the fact that compilation of Angular libraries is incompatible between major versions.

Note: In keycloak-angular v.9, it is needed to add allowSyntheticDefaultImports: true in the tsconfig.json file in your project. There is an issue in the keycloak project to update the typescript definitions file and solve the problem.

Choosing the right keycloak-js version

The Keycloak client documentation recommends to use the same version of your Keycloak installation.

A best practice is to load the JavaScript adapter directly from Keycloak Server as it will automatically be updated when you upgrade the server. If you copy the adapter to your web application instead, make sure you upgrade the adapter only after you have upgraded the server.

Setup

In order to make sure Keycloak is initialized when your application is bootstrapped you will have to add an APP_INITIALIZER provider to your AppModule. This provider will call the initializeKeycloak factory function shown below which will set up the Keycloak service so that it can be used in your application.

Use the code provided below as an example and implement it's functionality in your application. In this process ensure that the configuration you are providing matches that of your client as configured in Keycloak.

import { APP_INITIALIZER, NgModule } from '@angular/core';
import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser';
import { KeycloakAngularModule, KeycloakService } from 'keycloak-angular';
import { AppRoutingModule } from './app-routing.module';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';

function initializeKeycloak(keycloak: KeycloakService) {
  return () =>
    keycloak.init({
      config: {
        url: 'http://localhost:8080/auth',
        realm: 'your-realm',
        clientId: 'your-client-id'
      },
      initOptions: {
        onLoad: 'check-sso',
        silentCheckSsoRedirectUri:
          window.location.origin + '/assets/silent-check-sso.html'
      }
    });
}

@NgModule({
  declarations: [AppComponent],
  imports: [AppRoutingModule, BrowserModule, KeycloakAngularModule],
  providers: [
    {
      provide: APP_INITIALIZER,
      useFactory: initializeKeycloak,
      multi: true,
      deps: [KeycloakService]
    }
  ],
  bootstrap: [AppComponent]
})
export class AppModule {}

In the example we have set up Keycloak to use a silent check-sso. With this feature enabled, your browser will not do a full redirect to the Keycloak server and back to your application, instead this action will be performed in a hidden iframe, so your application resources only need to be loaded and parsed once by the browser when the app is initialized and not again after the redirect back from Keycloak to your app.

To ensure that Keycloak can communicate through the iframe you will have to serve a static HTML asset from your application at the location provided in silentCheckSsoRedirectUri.

Create a file called silent-check-sso.html in the assets directory of your application and paste in the contents as seen below.

<html>
  <body>
    <script>
      parent.postMessage(location.href, location.origin);
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

If you want to know more about these options and various other capabilities of the Keycloak client is recommended to read the JavaScript Adapter documentation.

Example project

If you want to see an complete overview a pre-configured client together with a working Keycloak server make sure to check out the example project in this repository.

AuthGuard

A generic AuthGuard, KeycloakAuthGuard is provided to help you protect authenticated routes in your application. This guard provides you with information to see if the user is logged in and a list of roles from that belong to the user. In your implementation you just need to implement the desired logic to protect your routes.

To write your own implementation extend the KeycloakAuthGuard class and implement the isAccessAllowed method. For example the code provided below checks if the user is authenticated and if not the user is requested to sign in. It also checks if the user has the correct roles which could be provided by passing the roles field into the data of the route.

import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import {
  ActivatedRouteSnapshot,
  Router,
  RouterStateSnapshot
} from '@angular/router';
import { KeycloakAuthGuard, KeycloakService } from 'keycloak-angular';

@Injectable({
  providedIn: 'root'
})
export class AuthGuard extends KeycloakAuthGuard {
  constructor(
    protected readonly router: Router,
    protected readonly keycloak: KeycloakService
  ) {
    super(router, keycloak);
  }

  public async isAccessAllowed(
    route: ActivatedRouteSnapshot,
    state: RouterStateSnapshot
  ) {
    // Force the user to log in if currently unauthenticated.
    if (!this.authenticated) {
      await this.keycloak.login({
        redirectUri: window.location.origin + state.url
      });
    }

    // Get the roles required from the route.
    const requiredRoles = route.data.roles;

    // Allow the user to to proceed if no additional roles are required to access the route.
    if (!(requiredRoles instanceof Array) || requiredRoles.length === 0) {
      return true;
    }

    // Allow the user to proceed if all the required roles are present.
    return requiredRoles.every((role) => this.roles.includes(role));
  }
}

HttpClient Interceptor

By default, all HttpClient requests will add the Authorization header in the format of: Authorization: Bearer **_TOKEN_**.

There is also the possibility to exclude requests that should not have the authorization header. This is accomplished by implementing the shouldAddToken method in the keycloak initialization. For example, the configuration below will not add the token to GET requests that match the paths /assets or /clients/public:

await keycloak.init({
  config: {
    url: 'http://localhost:8080/auth',
    realm: 'your-realm',
    clientId: 'your-client-id'
  },
  shouldAddToken: (request) => {
    const { method, url } = request;

    const isGetRequest = 'GET' === method.toUpperCase();
    const acceptablePaths = ['/assets', '/clients/public'];
    const isAcceptablePathMatch = urls.some((path) => url.includes(path));

    return !(isGetRequest && isAcceptablePathMatch);
  }
});

In the case where your application frequently polls an authenticated endpoint, you will find that users will not be logged out automatically over time. If that functionality is not desirable, you can add an http header to the polling requests then configure the shouldUpdateToken option in the keycloak initialization.

In the example below, any http requests with the header token-update: false will not trigger the user's keycloak token to be updated.

await keycloak.init({
  config: {
    url: 'http://localhost:8080/auth',
    realm: 'your-realm',
    clientId: 'your-client-id'
  },
  bearerExcludedUrls: ['/assets', '/clients/public'],
  shouldUpdateToken: (request) => {
    return !request.headers.get('token-update') === 'false';
  }
});

Keycloak-js Events

The callback events from keycloak-js are available through a RxJS subject which is defined by keycloakEvents$.

For example you make keycloak-angular auto refreshing your access token when expired:

keycloakService.keycloakEvents$.subscribe({
  next: (e) => {
    if (e.type == KeycloakEventType.OnTokenExpired) {
      keycloakService.updateToken(20);
    }
  }
});

Contributors

Mauricio Gemelli Vigolo	Jon Koops	Frederik Prijck	Jonathan Share	jmparra	Marcel Német	Raphael Alex Silva Abreu

If you want to contribute to the project, please check out the contributing document.

License

keycloak-angular is licensed under the MIT license.