This document is intended for developers who are setting up an instance of the Shibboleth SAML IdP for testing the Helix Authentication Service. Shibboleth is one of the oldest SAML 2.0 implementations, and freely available under an open source license.
To use the Docker containers defined in this project, you will need a
Docker installation, which should include Docker
Compose (docker compose
) to build and manage the containers. Host systems that
are not Linux will likely need Docker Desktop as well.
See the comments in containers/shibboleth/Dockerfile
as to how the image was built, which should offer some guidance when the time comes to update to a newer version of Shibboleth.
$ docker compose up --build -d
The SAML IdP metadata URL will be: https://shibboleth.doc:4443/idp/shibboleth
Use docker compose logs shibboleth.doc
to see the logs of the Shibboleth
server. It takes around 10 seconds on a fast machine to complete its startup. If
there are any Java exceptions in the log, then there is trouble. Otherwise, it
is working.
To open the Shibboleth landing page, open the https://hostname/idp
URL in your
browser. If you are using Docker Desktop, then hostname
will be localhost
.
By default the authentication service uses the redirect method when sending
authentication requests to the IdP, rather than POST. As such, the
SAML_IDP_SSO_URL
and SAML_IDP_SLO_URL
settings should be given the
HTTP-Redirect
versions of the values for the SingleSignOnService
and
SingleLogoutService
from the Shibboleth metadata.