We are going to deploy a keycloak development server on a virtual machine. This article is based on Johannes Reppin’s implementation. The basic steps are all mentioned in the README file of this repository. However, a few key steps are worth mentioning.

Our identity server has been deployed to a virtual machine that has been hosted in GCP. For your subdomain you just need to create an A type record in your DNS settings that point the subdomain to the external IP of the virtual machine. Thats’s it!

The initial steps are all in the Blog and this Plural Sight course. Once you have completed the steps, clone the repo, navigate to the repository dir on your machine and run the following commands

The interesting part about this installation is the nginxproxy/acme-companion image. This couples very nice with the base nginx image nginxproxy/nginx-proxy image as it issues an ssl certificate for you from let-encrypt.

$ docker compose pull
$ docker compose up -d

and Voilà! Your very own identity server is up and running. Don’t you just love open-source!