I'm recently working with microservices, developed as Spring Boot applications (v 2.2) and in my company we're using Keycloak as authorization server. We chose it because we need complex policies, roles and groups, and we also need the User Managed Authorization (UMA) to share resources between users.
We configured Keycloak with a single realm and many clients (one client per microservice). Now, I understand that I need to explicitly define Resources within Keycloak and this is fine, but the question is: do I really need to duplicate all of them in my microservice's property file? All the documentation, examples and tutorials end up with the same thing, that is something like:
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.enforcement-mode=PERMISSIVE
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[0].name=Car Resource
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[0].path=/cars/create
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[0].scopes[0]=car:create
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[1].path=/cars/{id}
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[1].methods[0].method=GET
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[1].methods[0].scopes[0]=car:view-detail
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[1].methods[1].method=DELETE
keycloak.policy-enforcer-config.paths[1].methods[1].scopes[0]=car:delete
(this second example fits better our case because it also uses different authorization scopes per http method).
In real life each microservice we're developing has dozens of endpoints and define them one by one seems to me a waste of time and a weakness in the code's robustness: we change an endpoint, we need to reconfigure it in both Keycloak and the application properties.
Is there a way to use some kind of annotation at Controller level? Something like the following pseudo-code:
@RestController
@RequestMapping("/foo")
public class MyController {
@GetMapping
@KeycloakPolicy(scope = "foo:view")
public ResponseEntity<String> foo() {
...
}
@PostMapping
@KeycloakPolicy(scope = "bar:create")
public ResponseEntity<String> bar() {
...
}
}