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## Chapter 18. User Federation SPI and LDAP/AD Integration

Keycloak can federate external user databases. Out of the box we have support for LDAP and Active Directory. Before you dive into this, you should understand how Keycloak does federation.

Keycloak performs federation a bit differently than other products/projects. The vision of Keycloak is that it is an out of the box solution that should provide a core set of feature irregardless of the backend user storage you want to use. Because of this requirement/vision, Keycloak has a set data model that all of its services use. Most of the time when you want to federate an external user store, much of the metadata that would be needed to provide this complete feature set does not exist in that external store. For example your LDAP server may only provide password validation, but not support TOTP or user role mappings. The Keycloak User Federation SPI was written to support these completely variable configurations.

The way user federation works is that Keycloak will import your federated users on demand to its local storage. How much metadata that is imported depends on the underlying federation plugin and how that plugin is configured. Some federation plugins may only import the username into Keycloak storage, others might import everything from name, address, and phone number, to user role mappings. Some plugins might want to import credentials directly into Keycloak storage and let Keycloak handle credential validation. Others might want to handle credential validation themselves. Thegoal of the Federation SPI is to support all of these scenarios.

## 18.1. LDAP and Active Directory Plugin

Keycloak comes with a built-in LDAP/AD plugin. Currently it is set up only to import username, email, first and last name. It supports password validation via LDAP/AD protocols and different user metadata synchronization modes. To configure a federated LDAP store go to the admin console. Click on the `Users` menu option to get you to the user management page. Then click on the `Federation` submenu option. When you get to this page there is an "Add Provider" select box. You should see "ldap" within this list. Selecting "ldap" will bring you to the ldap configuration page.

### 18.1.1. Edit Mode

Edit mode defines various synchronization options with your LDAP store depending on what privileges you have.

READONLY

  Username, email, first and last name will be unchangable. Keycloak will show an error anytime anybody tries to update these fields. Also, password updates will not be supported.

WRITABLE

  Username, email, first and last name, and passwords can all be updated and will be synchronized automatically with your LDAP store.

UNSYNCED

  Any changes to username, email, first and last name, and passwords will be stored in Keycloak local storage. It is up to you to figure out how to synchronize back to LDAP.

### 18.1.2. Other config options

Display Name

  Name used when this provider is referenced in the admin consle

Priority

  The priority of this provider when looking up users or for adding registrations.

Sync Registrations

  If a new user is added through a registration page or admin console, should the user be eligible to be synchronized to this provider.

Other options

  The rest of the configuration options should be self explanatory.

## 18.2. Writing your own User Federation Provider

The keycloak examples directory contains an example of a simple User Federation Provider backed by a simple properties file. See `examples/providers/federation-provider`. Most of how to create a federation provider is explain directly within the example code, but some information is here too.

Writing a User Federation Provider starts by implementing the `UserFederationProvider` and `UserFederationProviderFactory` interfaces. Please see the Javadoc and example for complete details on on how to do this. Some important methods of note: getUserByUsername() and getUserByEmail() require that you query your federated storage and if the user exists create and import the user into Keycloak storage. How much metadata you import is fully up to you. This import is done by invoking methods on the object returned `KeycloakSession.userStorage()` to add and import user information. The proxy() method will be called whenever Keycloak has found an imported UserModel. This allows the federation provider to proxy the UserModel which is useful if you want to support external storage updates on demand.

After your code is written you must package up all your classes within a JAR file. This jar file must contain a file called `org.keycloak.models.UserFederationProviderFactory` within the `META-INF/services` directory of the JAR. This file is a list of fully qualified classnames of all implementations of `UserFederationProviderFactory`. This is how Keycloak discovers which providers have been deployment. Place the JAR in the keycloak WAR deployment in the `WEB-INF/lib` directory.

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