You absolutely don't have to build a container. You can, and it makes startup a few seconds faster so they recommend it, since it's hardly a pain anyway if you

You absolutely don't have to build a container. You can, and it makes startup a few seconds faster so they recommend it, since it's hardly a pain anyway if you already have CI in place. Anyway, they changed the default behavior a few releases ago. In the past you had to pass --auto-build to avoid having to build, but now the default behavior is to auto build. If you instead want to optimize you have to do extra steps: https://www.keycloak.org/server/configuration https://www.keycloak.org/server/configuration