What's the best way to work on this repository

[daniel-ac-martin]

Hello,

I was wondering what the best way to work on this repository is. Do you have an easy way of testing your changes or did you just manually set up Keycloak locally?

[markwimpory]

Bear in mind that we haven't tested this yet, as we are waiting for the changes to be deployed to keycloak servers

[daniel-ac-martin]

Surely it needs to be tested before it gets deployed?

I managed to spin something up locally and it seemed to work reasonably well.

It's very difficult to actually work on because of docker images being immutable. So I was wondering who you guys did you you originally created it.

[paulwaitehomeoffice]

@daniel-ac-martin Excellent questions. I really should add some notes for working on this locally — I’ve been waiting to actually get it deployed, because if that never happens, there’s no point in working on it.

During development, I downloaded the standalone server distribution of Keycloak from its website, and ran that locally in order to develop and test the theme.

I didn’t go as far as setting up an e-mail or federated identity server, so I couldn’t test e-mail theming or the federated identity UI. Ideally I’d test that locally before getting it deployed to the Home Office Keycloak instance, but because each Keycloak realm’s administrator has to manually select the theme in order to use it, it seemed reasonable to get it deployed and test those aspects there, rather than (as a front-end developer) independently work out how to set up e-mail and federated identity on my laptop.

I’m sure it’s possible to get the Home Office’s Keycloak Docker image running locally to test this, but again, I’m a front-end developer, not a Docker expert, and I work on a Mac.

[paulwaitehomeoffice]

@daniel-ac-martin has added a Docker Keycloak... thingy so that developers can easily test changes locally.

I’ll write up docs for working with the repo. The currently-somewhat-crazy folder layout might get simplified first. It was sort of designed to make it easier to create different themes for different versions of Keycloak, GOV.UK Template, GOV.UK Front-End Toolkit and GOV.UK Elements, but it’s probably more sensible to just go with the latest version of each until we have an actual need to do anything else.