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Keycloak Backup and Restore
Follow up on my keycloak blogs about
- Running Keycloak in Docker with an external DB
- Run Keycloak locally with Docker compose
- backup and restore Keycloak
- Keycloak Cluster with Docker Compose — Up and Running in Seconds
In this document, I’d like to show you how you can backup and restore Keycloak
Design
Keycloak Backup has two parts:
- Backing up its realm
- Backing up its database
The design should be suitable for any platforms, that we run keycloak in standalone Virtual machine, kubernetes cluster, on AWS/Azure Clouds, or on-promise.
Todo list
I haven’t yet figured out how to automate the backup of its realm using scripts, allowing me to schedule a daily cronjob from a virtual machine. I’ll address and update this part later.
Backing up the realm
A Keycloak realm is a container for a set of users, credentials, and authentication mechanisms, as well as a set of applications or services that use those credentials. In Keycloak, a realm represents a security administrative domain where you can define your identity and access management configurations. Realms are often used to isolate different applications or services, each with its own set of users, roles, and authentication settings.
Within a Keycloak realm, you can define users, groups, roles, and various authentication flows. It allows you to manage access control and security policies for your applications or services. Realms provide a way to organize and secure different parts of your system, ensuring that users and services within a realm are isolated from those in other realms.
I prefer to back up each realm separately, generating distinct output files for each. This way, I can easily restore a specific realm without the need to restore all realms simultaneously.
- Connect to the Keycloak pod (This step is optional. If you have installed Keycloak directly on the host, you can skip this.)
$ kubectl exec -it $KEYCLOAK_POD -- /bin/bash
