Metadata Client Configuration
This page (and its child pages) show how to configure specific metadata clients. For more general configuration guidance, see the Metadata Consumption wiki page.
Metadata Client Configuration
There are three metadata clients that meet the basic requirements of a SAML deployment in the InCommon Federation:
- Shibboleth
- simpleSAMLphp
- pysFEMMA
Shibboleth and simpleSAMLphp are open-source implementations of the SAML Web Browser SSO Profile but both of them will automatically If you plan on using the Shibboleth software for federation purposes, you can in fact also use Shibboleth to download and verify signed metadata without having to rely on any other tools. Instructions how to configure Shibboleth or configure simpleSAMLphp for metadata consumption are provided elsewhere in this wiki.Other SAML implementations besides Shibboleth have built-in metadata support. For example, it is well known that simpleSAMLphp will consume InCommon Federation metadata. If you know of other SAML implementations that support SAML metadata, please let us know so we can document them here.
Although Microsoft AD FS is not able to directly consume the InCommon metadata aggregate, there are numerous third-party tools that can help. We recommend a third-party tool called pysFEMMA for this purpose. Details about pysFEMMA and other tools for configuring InCommon metadata with Microsoft AD FS are documented elsewhere in this wiki.
Regardless of your software implementation, however, you can always set up a cron job to refresh metadata, but in that case you will need additional tools to verify the XML signature at the time of refresh and to check the validUntil attribute as described on the Metadata Consumption wiki page. Participants are encouraged to share such tools and scripts for the benefit of the community. For instance, third-party tools that make InCommon metadata usable with Microsoft AD FS are documented elsewhere in this wiki.