Embedded Keycloak springboot application, upgrading keycloak from 12 to 14

We had similar vague error messages when upgrading our embedded keycloak to 15 in our Spring Boot/Servlet-style application. But we eventually fixed them by crawling through the code/history of the project that this baeldung.com tutorial was based; thomasdarimont's Embedded Keycloak Server running in a Spring Boot App. This repo is a few upgrades past the initial tutorial; up to Keycloak 13. We compared the history to our code and applying/testing fixes incrementally for each version from keycloak 11 to 13. After that, the updates from 13 to 15 were a bit easier to understand, and the errors were not as cryptic.

Our application is not exactly like the example code given in the Baeldung tutorial, but below is a list of changes we needed to upgrade to Keycloak 15.0.1. These changes may not be 1:1 with your project, but hopefully these help someone save some time.

• In KeycloakApplication moved the realm-setup functions from constructor method to bootstrap() method. (An example fix found here)

  
  public class EmbeddedKeycloakApplication extends KeycloakApplication {
  ...
  
   //public EmbeddedKeycloakApplication() {
   //    createMasterRealmAdminUser();
   //    createBaeldungRealm();
   //}
  
   @Override
   protected ExportImportManager bootstrap() {
       final ExportImportManager exportImportManager = super.bootstrap();
       createMasterRealmAdminUser();
       createBaeldungRealm();
       return exportImportManager;
   }
  
  

• In the EmbeddedKeycloakConfig we added a couple new bean references/factories (Both found here)

  
  public class EmbeddedKeycloakConfig {
  ...
   @Bean("fixedThreadPool")
   public ExecutorService fixedThreadPool() {
       return Executors.newFixedThreadPool(5);
   }
  
   @Bean
   @ConditionalOnMissingBean(name = "springBootPlatform")
   protected SimplePlatformProvider springBootPlatform() {
       return (SimplePlatformProvider) Platform.getPlatform();
   }
  
  

• In our keycloak-server.json, we removed the default 'concurrenthashmap' name from the mapStorage provider, but still provided the concurrenthashmap properties. This matches other Keycloak 15 examples. As Paul mentioned, the map_storage needs to be enabled, and the simplest solution is to use the system properties -Dkeycloak.profile.feature.map_storage=enabled -Dkeycloak.mapStorage.provider=concurrenthashmap. Similar examples can be found in the Keycloak test suites here and here . HOWEVER: We ran into errors when using these system properties, and decided it is not needed for our code. Luckilly, the 'mapStorage' is no specifically called out in the tutorial; it is only found in the Referenced Tutorial Code. So we simply matched other Keycloak 13+ examples and removed the reference in the keycloak-server.json (shown below) to get rid of the null pointer exception.

  
  //Change this:
   "mapStorage": {
       "provider": "${keycloak.mapStorage.provider:concurrenthashmap}",
       "concurrenthashmap": {
           "dir": "${project.build.directory:target}"
       }
   },
  
  //To This
   "mapStorage": {
       "provider": "${keycloak.mapStorage.provider:}",
       "concurrenthashmap": {
           "dir": "${project.build.directory:target}"
       } 
   },
  
  

• Upgraded the proper infinispan and rest versions with keycloak version. (Tutorial code reference)

  
  < properties>
   < keycloak.version>15.0.1</keycloak.version>
  
   < !-- these should be updated together with Keycloak -->
   < !-- check keycloak-dependencies-server-all effective pom -->
   < infinispan.version>11.0.9.Final</infinispan.version>
   < resteasy.version>3.15.1.Final/resteasy.version>
  
  < /properties>
  

• We also added the temp directory location in the SimplePlatformProvider, since this field was required. NOTE: The system temp folder, used in the example, is not recommended for production.

  
   @Override
   public File getTmpDirectory() {
       return System.getProperty("java.io.tmpdir");
   }
  
  

I hope someone finds this info useful, Good luck!

I’ve tried the same thing with keycloak 15 and I got the same result. It seems that keycloak’s ConcurrentHashMapStorageProvider isn’t taken in account.

EDIT: after looking into keycloak's code, I've found that MAP_STORAGE functionality is disabled by default (because the feature is tagged as EXPERIMENTAL). To resolve this issue you must launch your springboot app with the following Java option :

-Dkeycloak.profile.feature.map_storage=enabled

Unfortunately, I'm now facing another nullPointerException...

I have applied the changes suggested by @mrieman to the initial baeldung.com tutorial. It works fine with 17.0.1 version of Keycloak as of now. Hope it will help someone. My repository on Github is here