Creating Roles in Keycloak

In Keycloak, roles are used to define and manage permissions and access levels for users and clients within a realm. Roles provide a way to control and enforce authorization policies, allowing you to specify what users or clients are allowed to do within your system. There are two main types of roles in Keycloak:

1. Realm Roles: These roles are defined at the realm level and are available across all clients within that realm. Realm roles are typically used for global permissions that apply to all applications within the realm. For example, you can create roles like “admin,” “user,” or “manager” at the realm level.
2. Client Roles: These roles are specific to individual client applications within the realm. Each client can have its own set of roles that define access permissions specific to that application. For example, for a social media application, you might have roles like “post,” “comment,” or “like” at the client level.

Creating Realm Roles

Step 1: To create a new Realm Roles, click on the Realm roles menu from the left pane and click the Create role button.

Step 2: In the next screen provide the role name as per your requirements.

Creating Client Roles

Step 1: To create a new Client Role, navigate to clients from the left panel. Then select your client created by you. Then click Roles Press the Create role button.

Step 2: In the next screen provide the role name as per your requirements.

Keycloak is Open Source Identity and Access Management (IAM) tool developed by Red Hat. By using this you can add authentication to applications and secure services with minimum effort. No need to deal with storing users or authenticating users. Keycloak provides user federation, strong authentication, user management, fine-grained authorization, and more.

Note: To install Keyclok on your machine refer to this article What is Keycloak and How to Install It?

In this article, we will see how to Create a Realm, Client, and User in Keycloak.