Does Keycloak stopped configuration with Wildfly after Keyclaok 17?

Question

What is meaning of ( https://www.keycloak.org/archive/downloads-17.0.1.html )

Keycloak: Distribution powered by Quarkus
Keycloak WildFly (deprecated): Distribution powered by WildFly

When i see documentation it says:

The default distribution of Keycloak is now powered by Quarkus, which brings a number 
of breaking changes to you configure Keycloak and deploy custom providers. 
For more information check out the Quarkus Migration Guide.

The WildFly distribution of Keycloak is now deprecated, with support ending June 2022. 
We recommend migrating to the Quarkus distribution as soon as possible. 
However, if you need to remain on the legacy WildFly distribution for some time, 
there are some changes to consider

I am using Wildfly as application Server where projects are deployed.

Shall this means i use Wildfly distribution of Keycloak only whose support is ending June 2022.

or

Does this mean that Keycloak use Wildfly underneath and not use that anymore and quarkus is used? (now here can quarkus distribution work fine with wildfly settings we currently have)

Answer 1

Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with WildFly anymore. Until recent versions, the Keycloak was being packaged as a Java EE archive file (or as WildFly module) that you could deploy into WildFly application server.

Quarkus on the other hand is a framework to develop cloud native Java applications. It's runtime relies on many open source projects for underlying services (eg Vertx, SmallRye projects, etc.) and has a completely different architecture. As part of such a migration, Keycloak is now being packaged as an standalone java application (that is a typical output for an app developed using Quarkus) and contains all its dependencies. So there is no deployment/installation on WildFly anymore.

Quarkus applications are being designed by default to be run on cloud environments like Kube.netes. So you may also require to consider if you can benefit from this if you have such an infrastructure in your organization (however it's not mandatory and you can just run it as a normal java app on your server). But you can definitely not use your WildFly specific configurations (eg the Keycloak subsystem or OpenID subsystem) anymore.

You can find more details here .

Answer 2

Quarkus is a variation of Wildfly that is packaged in such a way as to make containerization (ie Docker, Kube.netes, etc.) much easier. Applications written for Wildfly (and JEE in general) can be made to run in Quarkus quickly.

Wildfy 25 and above include OIDC functionality internally. Therefore, you don't need to install the Keycloak extensions like you used to. And Keycloak, as of version 15, is based on Quarkus too. Because of this there is a build phase of the installation that lets you set many of the options before the run phase. For example, I used to setup a data source in the standalone.xml for my database. Now, I use the resources.properties to setup my database for Keycloak. The concepts are similar.

If you're using a version of Wildfly less than 25 then you'll still want the Keycloak adapter.