Introduction
Keycloak ships with a built-in mechanism for restricting user registration by email domain — but it's static. Changing the allow-list means touching realm configuration and redeploying. For B2B SaaS products that onboard new tenants regularly, that's an operational bottleneck you don't want.
The right solution is to move domain policy out of Keycloak entirely and delegate it to a backend service that can be updated at runtime. This article walks through building a custom Keycloak Authenticator — called domain-email-validator — that does exactly that: at login time, it calls an external API to decide whether the user's email domain is permitted.
By the end, you'll understand the full architecture, the Java implementation, how to wire it into both browser and IDP flows, and the operational tradeoffs involved.
Why Static Domain Restrictions Fall Short in B2B Products
