Configuring outgoing HTTP requests

Keycloak often needs to make requests to the applications and services that it secures. Keycloak manages these outgoing connections using an HTTP client. This guide shows how to configure the client, connection pool, proxy environment settings, timeouts, and more.

Client Configuration Command

The HTTP client that Keycloak uses for outgoing communication is highly configurable. To configure the Keycloak outgoing HTTP client, enter this command:

bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --spi-connections-http-client-default-<configurationoption>=<value>

The following are the command options:

establish-connection-timeout-millis

Maximum time in milliseconds until establishing a connection times out. Default: Not set.

socket-timeout-millis

Maximum time of inactivity between two data packets until a socket connection times out, in milliseconds. Default: 5000ms

connection-pool-size

Size of the connection pool for outgoing connections. Default: 128.

max-pooled-per-route

How many connections can be pooled per host. Default: 64.

connection-ttl-millis

Maximum connection time to live in milliseconds. Default: Not set.

max-connection-idle-time-millis

Maximum time an idle connection stays in the connection pool, in milliseconds. Idle connections will be removed from the pool by a background cleaner thread. Set this option to -1 to disable this check. Default: 900000.

disable-cookies

Enable or disable caching of cookies. Default: true.

client-keystore

File path to a Java keystore file. This keystore contains client certificates for two-way SSL.

client-keystore-password

Password for the client keystore. REQUIRED, when client-keystore is set.

client-key-password

Password for the private key of the client. REQUIRED, when client-keystore is set.

proxy-mappings

Specify proxy configurations for outgoing HTTP requests. For more details, see Proxy mappings for outgoing HTTP requests.

disable-trust-manager

If an outgoing request requires HTTPS and this configuration option is set to true, you do not have to specify a truststore. This setting should be used only during development and never in production because it will disable verification of SSL certificates. Default: false.

Proxy mappings for outgoing HTTP requests

To configure outgoing requests to use a proxy, you can use the following standard proxy environment variables to configure the proxy mappings: HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY, and NO_PROXY.

  • The HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY variables represent the proxy server that is used for outgoing HTTP requests. Keycloak does not differentiate between the two variables. If you define both variables, HTTPS_PROXY takes precedence regardless of the actual scheme that the proxy server uses.

  • The NO_PROXY variable defines a comma separated list of hostnames that should not use the proxy. For each hostname that you specify, all its subdomains are also excluded from using proxy.

The environment variables can be lowercase or uppercase. Lowercase takes precedence. For example, if you define both HTTP_PROXY and http_proxy, http_proxy is used.

Example of proxy mappings and environment variables
HTTPS_PROXY=https://www-proxy.acme.com:8080
NO_PROXY=google.com,login.facebook.com

In this example, the following results occur:

  • All outgoing requests use the proxy https://www-proxy.acme.com:8080 except for requests to google.com or any subdomain of google.com, such as auth.google.com.

  • login.facebook.com and all its subdomains do not use the defined proxy, but groups.facebook.com uses the proxy because it is not a subdomain of login.facebook.com.

Proxy mappings using regular expressions

An alternative to using environment variables for proxy mappings is to configure a comma-delimited list of proxy-mappings for outgoing requests sent by Keycloak. A proxy-mapping consists of a regex-based hostname pattern and a proxy-uri, using the format hostname-pattern;proxy-uri.

For example, consider the following regex:

*\.(google|googleapis)\.com

You apply a regex-based hostname pattern by entering this command:

bin/kc.[sh|bat] start --spi-connections-http-client-default-proxy-mappings="'*\\\.(google|googleapis)\\\.com;http://www-proxy.acme.com:8080'"

To determine the proxy for the outgoing HTTP request, the following occurs:

  • The target hostname is matched against all configured hostname patterns.

  • The proxy-uri of the first matching pattern is used.

  • If no configured pattern matches the hostname, no proxy is used.

When your proxy server requires authentication, include the credentials of the proxy user in the format username:password@. For example:

.*\.(google|googleapis)\.com;http://proxyuser:password@www-proxy.acme.com:8080
Example of regular expressions for proxy-mapping:
# All requests to Google APIs use http://www-proxy.acme.com:8080 as proxy
.*\.(google|googleapis)\.com;http://www-proxy.acme.com:8080

# All requests to internal systems use no proxy
.*\.acme\.com;NO_PROXY

# All other requests use http://fallback:8080 as proxy
.*;http://fallback:8080

In this example, the following occurs:

  • The special value NO_PROXY for the proxy-uri is used, which means that no proxy is used for hosts matching the associated hostname pattern.

  • A catch-all pattern ends the proxy-mappings, providing a default proxy for all outgoing requests.

Outgoing HTTPS request truststore

Please take a look at the Configuring a Truststore guide about how to configure a Keycloak Truststore so that Keycloak is able to perform outgoing requests using TLS.