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Keycloak Governance
Vision
Keycloak aims to be easy to use and lightweight. The project was founded to make it easy for application developers to secure modern applications and services.
The 80/20 rule, that states 80% of requirements come from around 20% of use cases, is a core part of the vision behind Keycloak. We strongly believe if Keycloak would support all use cases by default it would become bloated and hard to use.
Keycloak aims to be opinionated and make it as easy as possible to achieve the common use cases, while still enabling the less common use cases through custom extensions.
Projects
Keycloak consists of several projects:
- Keycloak - Keycloak Server and Java adapters
- Keycloak UI - Keycloak Admin and Account user interface
- Keycloak Documentation - Documentation for Keycloak
- Keycloak QuickStarts - QuickStarts for getting started with Keycloak
- Keycloak Benchmark - Load tests for benchmarking Keycloak
- Keycloak Community - Keycloak design documents
- Keycloak Web - Website keycloak.org
The same governance model applies to all projects. However, the list of maintainers may vary per project.
Maintainers
The list of maintainers can be found in the MAINTAINERS.md file in the repository for the individual projects listed in the Projects section.
Maintainer Responsibilities
A maintainer is someone who has shown deep knowledge of vision, features and codebase. It is their responsibility to drive the project forward, encourage collaboration and contributions, and generally help the community.
Responsibilities of a maintainer include, but are not limited to:
- Engage in design discussions
- Actively monitor mailing lists, user forum and chat
- Contribute high quality code
- Maintain deep knowledge of vision, features and codebase
- Review pull requests either personally or delegate to experts in the relevant area
- Helping the community
Becoming a Maintainer
To become a maintainer, you need to demonstrate the following:
- Good understanding of vision, features and codebase
- Contribution of larger features
- Contribution of bug fixes
- Participation in design discussions
- Participation in pull request reviews
- Ability to collaborate with the team
- Helping the community
A new maintainer must be proposed by sending an email to keycloak-maintainers(at)googlegroups.com. The email should include evidence of the above list.
The existing maintainers will then discuss the proposal. If anyone objects or wants more information, the maintainers will reach out to the nominee directly for further discussion.
For the nominee to be accepted as a maintainer at least 2/3 of existing maintainers have to approve the nominee.
Changes in Maintainership
Maintainers can be removed if at least 2/3 of existing maintainers agree.
Contributing Changes
The process of reviewing proposed changes differs depending of the size and impact of the change.
Minor Changes
A minor change is a bug fix, a smaller enhancement or a smaller addition to existing features.
To propose a minor change, simply create an issue in our issue tracker and send a pull request.
A maintainer will be responsible for ultimately approving the pull request. The maintainer may do a deep review of the pull request or delegate to an expert in the corresponding area.
If the change has a bigger impact it has to follow the process for larger changes.
Larger Changes
For larger changes all maintainers and contributors should have a chance of reviewing the change. This is done through GitHub Discussions.
For new features we highly recommend always opening a discussion in GitHub Discussions early.
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.
The contributor can decide to send a pull request prior to discussions. However, the change will not be accepted until it has been discussed through GitHub Discussions.
If there are any objections to the change they can in most cases be resolved through discussions in GitHub Discussions, or in the pull request. If a resolution can not be made it can be accepted if at least 2/3 of maintainers approve the change.