oidc-testing-playground

Some setup to be able to test an OIDC client

The problem: when you are trying to debug and test an OIDC client locally, it is difficult. There are two main players that play a huge role: the OIDC Server and the load balancer that sits in front of your service.

The second player, the load balancer, can be easy to forget if you are testing your application locally. However, when you are deploying your application to a cluster without sticky sessions, the load balancer plays a big role and its nice to be able to test this locally.

To create a test service, we use keycloak. To create a test loadbalancer, we use nginx.

Prerequisites

This setup uses Docker and bash.

Setting up your playground

There are a few steps of setup for both the OIDC server and the loadbalancer.

Start you application locally on a few ports
Modify the bin/nginx/nginx.conf. The server host.docker.internal:5677 lines should be modified so that you have one line for each instance of your service that is running and the port after host.docker.internal is the port that the instance is running on
Run ./bin/create. This will create a keycloak docker image, create an OIDC client within that image (printing the client secret to the console), and set up and start an NGINX using the config in bin/nginx/nginx.conf

The options for the create script can be modified using environment variables:

CLIENT_ID specifies the id of the client that will be generated (default: myclient)
NGINX_CONF specifies the absolute path to the nginx config that will be used (by default, bin/nginx.conf)
REDIRECT_URL for your application. Defaults to http://localhost/* which is the wildcard for the loadbalancer which is started with the nginx config

Running the Playground

Once you've set up your playground, you can start it with ./bin/start and stop it with ./bin/stop

Deleting the Playground

Delete everything with ./bin/remove

License