keycloak how to set admin credentials for webconsole login

Question

I have installed keycloak 18.0.0 on an AWS ubuntu server. After following through the keycloak guide referred here: https://www.keycloak.org/docs/latest/server_admin/#creating-first-admin_server_administration_guide

I exported the admin username and password with the following commands and restarted the server.

export KEYCLOAK_ADMIN=admin
export KEYCLOAK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin

I restarted the service using the below command.

./bin/kc.sh start-dev --https-certificate-file=./cert.pem --https-certificate-key-file=./key.pem

I am able to access the welcome page of the keycloak and also able to navigate to admin login page. However, when I enter the configured username and password, it fails to authenticate.

My understanding of keycloak is minimal as I just started at it, a few days ago.

• So, how do I know, if keycloak is taking the credentials from env vars?
• Is there any place I have to look for the credentials in the file system?
• Am I doing the whole thing wrong? I am starting the keycloak in dev mode, whereas the document seems to be for production. I can't run it in production as I get error when I run the kc server like

bin/kc.sh start <options>

instead of

bin/kc.sh start-dev <options>

Thanks in advance for helping me on this...