Keycloak is an Open Source Identity and Access Management solution for modern Applications and Services.
Details for building from source and working with the codebase are provided in the building and working with the code base guide.
Keycloak is an Open Source community-driven project and we welcome contributions as well as feedback from the community. We do have a few guidelines in place to help you be successful with your contribution to Keycloak.
Firstly, if you want to contribute a larger change to Keycloak we ask that you open a discussion first. For minor changes you can skip this part and go straight ahead to sending a contribution. Bear in mind that if you open a discussion first you can identify if the change will be accepted, as well as getting early feedback.
Here's a quick checklist for a good PR, more details below:
- A discussion around the change (https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/discussions/categories/ideas)
- A GitHub Issue with a good description associated with the PR
- One feature/change per PR
- One commit per PR
- PR rebased on main (
git rebase
, notgit pull
) - Good descriptive commit message, with link to issue
- No changes to code not directly related to your PR
- Includes functional/integration test
- Includes documentation
Once you have submitted your PR please monitor it for comments/feedback. We reserve the right to close inactive PRs if you do not respond within 2 weeks (bear in mind you can always open a new PR if it is closed due to inactivity).
Also, please remember that we do receive a fairly large amount of PRs and also have code to write ourselves, so we may not be able to respond to your PR immediately. The best place to ping us is on the thread you started on the dev mailing list.
If you would like to contribute to Keycloak, but are not sure exactly what to work on, you can find a number of open
issues that are awaiting contributions in
issues.
As Keycloak is a community-driven project we require contributors to open a discussion on what they are planning to contribute.
Discussions should first and foremost be done through GitHub Discussions.
The Keycloak Dev Mailing List can be used to notify the community on your new discussion, and can also be used for more low-level implementation discussions.
For very large proposals it can be inefficient to capture all the information in the GitHub Discussion. In this cases a separate design proposal can be sent to the Keycloak Community repository, and linked to from the GitHub Discussion.
Take your time to write a proper issue including a good summary and description.
Remember this may be the first thing a reviewer of your PR will look at to get an idea of what you are proposing and it will also be used by the community in the future to find about what new features and enhancements are included in new releases.
Details for building from source and working with the codebase are provided in the building and working with the code base guide.
Do not format or refactor code that is not directly related to your contribution. If you do this it will significantly increase our effort in reviewing your PR. If you have a strong need to refactor code then submit a separate PR for the refactoring.
Details for implementing tests are provided in the writing tests guide.
Do not add mock frameworks or other testing frameworks that are not already part of the testsuite. Please write tests in the same way as we have written our tests.
We require contributions to include relevant documentation. Before submitting your code changes, please take the time to review the documentation guide and ensure that any necessary documentation changes are included in your pull request.
When preparing your PR make sure you have a single commit and your branch is rebased on the main branch from the project repository.
This means use the git rebase
command and not git pull
when integrating changes from main to your branch. See
Git Documentation for more details.
We require that you squash to a single commit. You can do this with the git rebase -i HEAD~X
command where X
is the number of commits you want to squash. See the Git Documentation
for more details.
The above helps us review your PR and also makes it easier for us to maintain the repository. It is also required by our automatic merging process.
Please, also provide a good description commit message, with a link to the issue. We also require that the commit message includes a link to the issue (linking a pull request to an issue).
Any contributions to Keycloak must only contain code that can legally be contributed to Keycloak, and which the Keycloak project can distribute under its license.
Prior to contributing to Keycloak please read the Developer's Certificate of Origin
and sign-off all commits with the --signoff
option provided by git commit
. For example:
git commit --signoff --message "This is the commit message"
This option adds a Signed-off-by
trailer at the end of the commit log message.
The format for a commit message should look like:
A brief descriptive summary
Optionally, more details around how it was implemented
Closes #1234
The very last part of the commit message should be a link to the GitHub issue, when done correctly GitHub will automatically link the issue with the PR. There are 3 alternatives provided by GitHub here:
- Closes: Issues in the same repository
- Fixes: Issues in a different repository (this shouldn't be used, as issues should be created in the correct repository instead)
- Resolves: When multiple issues are resolved (this should be avoided)
Although, GitHub allows alternatives (close, closed, fix, fixed), please only use the above formats.
Creating multi line commit messages with git
can be done with:
git commit -m "Summary" -m "Optional description" -m "Closes #1234"
Alternatively, shift + enter
can be used to add line breaks:
$ git commit -m "Summary
>
> Optional description
>
> Closes #1234"
For more information linking PRs to issues refer to the GitHub Documentation.