Neo4j SSO with Keycloak

Uses Neo4j's own SSO capabilities.

What's inside ?

This repository contains a fuly pre-configured setup with Docker :

Neo4j

• Neo4j 5.x running on http://localhost:7474
• Movies DB created with movies data
• Admins DB created with one Admin node
• Native authentication : neo4j / password
• Role analyst created with access to movies db, denied on Person::born property

Keycloak

• Keycloak 25.x (on Quarkus) running on http://localhost:8180
• Keycloak administrator credentials : admin / admin123
• Realm named my-realm created
• A public openid client named neo4j-sso created with 2 client roles admin and analyst
• Two users configured
  • admin / password -> has admin role mapped to neo4j-sso client
  • analyst / password -> has analyst role mapped to neo4j-sso client

If you want to use a non-Quarkus setup of Keycloak, check out the keycloak-15 branch of this repository

---

SSL Certificates

Warning

Since Neo4j 5.3, URIs for connecting to OIDC providers must use HTTPS so it requires to create locally self-signed certificates and Keycloak to be configured with https.

This repository contains a certificates directory, we will use it to store our self-signed certificates.

To generate the certificates we will use mkcert, but using a Docker image so you don't have to install anything locally.

First, choose a domain name for your local development, the examples will use keycloak, make sure to replace the occurrences with your chosen domain name when instructed.

Generate the certificates

From the root of this repo, run the following command ( replace keycloak with your chosen domain name )

docker run --rm -it -e domain=keycloak --name mkcert -v $PWD/certificates:/root/.local/share/mkcert ikwattro/mkcert-docker


// out
Created a new local CA 💥
The local CA is now installed in the system trust store! ⚡️


Created a new certificate valid for the following names 📜
 - "keycloak"

The certificate is at "./keycloak.pem" and the key at "./keycloak-key.pem" ✅

It will expire on 17 March 2025 🗓

This will generate 4 files in the certificates directory

ls -la certificates

// out
$ ls -la certificates/
total 40
drwxr-xr-x   7 christophewillemsen  staff   224 Dec 17 22:07 ./
drwxr-xr-x  10 christophewillemsen  staff   320 Dec 17 17:50 ../
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff    13 Dec 17 15:15 .gitignore
-rw-------   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1704 Dec 17 22:07 keycloak-key.pem
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1476 Dec 17 22:07 keycloak.pem
-r--------   1 christophewillemsen  staff  2484 Dec 17 22:07 rootCA-key.pem
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1639 Dec 17 22:07 rootCA.pem

You will now need to add the root certificate authority to your OS trustore, the following instruction is for Mac OSX

sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain $PWD/certificates/rootCA.pem

Now we need to add the certificates to a java cacerts file, the easiest way to do this is to copy the cacerts file from a neo4j container

docker build -t java-cacerts-import --build-arg CERTIFICATES_PATH=certificates  -f CacertsDockerfile .

docker run --rm -it --name neo4j-cacerts -v $(PWD)/certificates:/tmp/cacerts java-cacerts-import

The latest command added the cacerts file in the certificates directory

$ ls -la certificates/
total 48
drwxr-xr-x   8 christophewillemsen  staff   256 Dec 17 22:19 ./
drwxr-xr-x  10 christophewillemsen  staff   320 Dec 17 17:50 ../
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff    13 Dec 17 15:15 .gitignore
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1558 Dec 17 22:19 cacerts
-rw-------   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1704 Dec 17 22:07 keycloak-key.pem
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1476 Dec 17 22:07 keycloak.pem
-r--------   1 christophewillemsen  staff  2484 Dec 17 22:07 rootCA-key.pem
-rw-r--r--   1 christophewillemsen  staff  1639 Dec 17 22:07 rootCA.pem

The last step is to add keycloak or your chosen domain name to your /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1	keycloak

Launch

If you didn't use keycloak is to edit the variable LOCAL_DEV_HOST in the .env file of this repository with your chosen domain name.

The docker-compose file is configured for taking into account the usage of local certificates, mainly the following sections are relevant :

• the cacerts file mounted in the neo4j container
• extra_hosts section for the neo4j and keycloak-config services so they use the host's entry for the domain name
• using the certificates in the keycloak startup command

docker compose up -d

Login

Go to the Neo4j browser (http://localhost:7474/), choose SSO for the login and log in with admin/password credentials

Check you can access the movies and admins db.

Go to Keycloak and clear all sessions.

Go back to the Neo4j browser, login again but this time with analyst / password credentials

You should see only the movies and neo4j databases, you also shouldn't see the born property on the Person nodes.

---