WildFly Elytron 1.8.0.Final has been released and is included with WildFly 16 Final, which is now available for download. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at what’s new in Elytron in WildFly 16.

Silent mode for HTTP Basic authentication

Setting a simple property for the HTTP Basic authentication mechanism in your application’s deployment descriptor enables silent mode. This is useful when paired with HTTP Form authentication, allowing human users to log in using the Form authentication mechanism and programmatic clients to log in using the Basic authentication mechanism. More details can be found in this blog post.

Automatic detection of file-based KeyStore types

When adding a file-based key-store in the Elytron subsystem, the type attribute no longer needs to be specified. Instead, the Elytron subsystem will now automatically detect the type.

Utility to migrate legacy properties files to Elytron

It is now easy to migrate legacy properties files to an Elytron filesystem-realm using the WildFly Elytron Tool. Take a look at this blog post for the migration steps.

EE Security API integration with Elytron

It is possible to make use of the new Security API in Java EE 8 defined under JSR-375 with Elytron. Details on how to get started with EE security can now be found here.

Obtain and manage certificates from Let’s Encrypt using the WildFly Management Console

Since WildFly 14, it is possible to obtain and manage certificates from Let’s Encrypt using the WildFly CLI. WildFly 16 now adds the ability to also make use of the web-based WildFly Management Console to do this. The details, including screenshots, can be found here.

User self-service example

Elytron’s APIs allow identities to be modified, making it possible for users to update their credentials and/or other information about themselves. This two-part blog post shows how to create a web application for user self-service.

Custom principal transformer example

Although there are a few different principal transformers that can be used out of the box with WildFly, it is also possible to implement custom principal transformers that can be registered using the Elytron subsystem. This blog post describes how to create and make use of a custom Elytron principal transformer.

Jira release notes

The full list of issues resolved is available here.

Where to find more information

As always, be sure to check out our blog posts page, where we collect references to all our blog posts on Elytron features. If there is an Elytron topic you’d like to see a blog post on, feel free to leave a comment on that page to ask for it. Questions on Elytron are also welcome on WildFly’s user forums.

To learn more about the Elytron subsystem, take a look at the Elytron documentation.