Deployment

Production: .jar into providers/

Export your theme as a .jar from the editor and drop it into your Keycloak instance:

1. In the editor, click Export and download the .jar file
2. Copy the .jar into your Keycloak providers/ directory
3. Restart Keycloak (or run kc.sh build if using Quarkus distribution)
4. In the Admin Console, go to Realm Settings > Themes and select your theme

keycloak/
  providers/
    my-theme.jar    <-- drop it here

Building in a CI pipeline

If you version-control your exported theme folder, you can package the .jar as part of your build pipeline. The .jar needs a META-INF/keycloak-themes.json manifest for Keycloak to discover it. The editor handles this automatically when you export, but if you're building from source files you'll need to include it.

Development: theme folder into themes/

For local development, you can skip the .jar and mount your theme folder directly into Keycloak's themes/ directory:

keycloak/
  themes/
    my-theme/
      login/
        theme.properties
        resources/
          css/
          img/

Keycloak picks up themes from this directory without packaging. This is useful for fast iteration but should not be used in production.