Creating Resources

Creating a resource is straightforward and generic. Your main concern is the granularity of the resources you create. In other words, resources can be created to represent a set of one or more resources and the way you define them is crucial to managing permissions.

To create a new resource, click Create in the right upper corner of the resource listing.

Add Resource

Add Resource

In Keycloak, a resource defines a small set of information that is common to different types of resources, such as:

  • Name

    A human-readable and unique string describing this resource.

  • Type

    A string uniquely identifying the type of a set of one or more resources. The type is a string used to group different resource instances. For example, the default type for the default resource that is automatically created is urn:resource-server-name:resources:default

  • URI

    A URI that provides the location/address for the resource. For HTTP resources, the URI is usually the relative path used to serve these resources.

  • Scopes

    One or more scopes to associate with the resource.

Typed Resources

The type field of a resource can be used to group different resources together, so they can be protected using a common set of permissions.

Resource Owners

Resources also have an owner. By default, resources are owned by the resource server.

However, resources can also be associated with users, so you can create permissions based on the resource owner. For example, only the resource owner is allowed to delete or update a given resource.

Managing Resources Remotely

Resource management is also exposed through the Protection API to allow resource servers to remotely manage their resources.

When using the Protection API, resource servers can be implemented to manage resources owned by their users. In this case, you can specify the user identifier to configure a resource as belonging to a specific user.

Note
 Keycloak provides resource servers complete control over their resources. In the future, we should be able to allow users to control their own resources as well as approve authorization requests and manage permissions, especially when using the UMA protocol.