Introduction

There’s no substitute for understanding what you’re doing, and that in turn is difficult without seeing what is happening. Debugging Keycloak OIDC problems without understanding what is happening under the hood is no exception to this rule. The purpose of this article is twofold:

1. Help you learn how Keycloak OIDC token exchange work

2. Provide you with the tools to debug Keycloak OIDC token exchanges in production environments

For the purposes of this blog post I’ve been using the OpenID Connect Playground application from the book Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications from Packt Publishing. I can recommend that book for anyone who needs to understand Keycloak and in particular the protocols it supports (OAuth2, OIDC and SAML 2.0).