The Shibboleth SP software features FastCGI authorizer and responder applications for use with any web server that supports FastCGI. These applications can be used with nginx with the nginx-http-shibboleth module, but are entirely web-server agnostic. Whilst present in the Shibboleth SP source code, these FastCGI applications are not built into existing Shibboleth packages. Hence, this repository – scripts for rebuilding the existing Shibboleth packages with FastCGI support.
We currently support the following OSes:
- CentOS/RHEL 8 (x86_64)
- CentOS/RHEL 7 (x86_64)
- CentOS/RHEL 6 (x86_64)
The rebuilding script is designed to work with SP version 3.1.0 and up. Build scripts for older versions of the SP can be found in the tags and commit history.
Unfortunately, the default distributions of the Shibboleth SP don't come with
FastCGI support built by default. Questions have been raised on the
Shibboleth mailing list about adding this support to the core build, but to
date this hasn't happened because the fcgi-devel package lives in the EPEL
repositories
and not the core.
If you can help twist someone's arm to adjust this decision, that'd help eliminate the need for this repository and us manually rebuilding Shibboleth each time a new release comes out.
By "manually", we mean watching for or otherwise being told about new Shibboleth SP releases, and then ensuring the package rebuild process continues to function. Here's the current ATOM feed from the Shibboleth wiki covering their blog post announcements, which occasionally includes SP software releases.
This will always build the latest version of the Shibboleth SP and does so by spinning up a Docker container for recompilation of the packages.
Ensure Docker and Docker Compose are installed.
Run the following:
git clone https://github.com/nginx-shib/shibboleth-fastcgi.git cd shibboleth-fastcgi make
Enjoy your new packages, available in the
build/directory, categorised by OS and distribution name.When finished building, clean up your environment:
make clean
If you're not into Docker, then you can use the shibboleth-rebuild.sh
script directly on your own VM. You'll need to ensure you have set up the
basic dependencies of building RPMs or packages first; see any of the
Dockerfile files for more information.
If you're just looking to download something that works and don't want to rebuild things yourself, the James Cook University eResearch Centre provides EL x86_64 packages in repos at https://www.hpc.jcu.edu.au/repos/jcu_eresearch/. You'll need to trust our RPM building skills and note that no support is offered to the public for this service.
If running docker-compose up repeatedly, such as when you might be
modifying the build scripts, note that docker-compose creates anonymous
volumes and retains the file system from the initial run of the containers.
This means that the built shibboleth packages will be "installed" already.
We automatically handle this by cleaning up this situation in each relevant
Dockerfile but you can start afresh with a call like so:
make clean make
which cleans up the anonymous volumes before starting again.
For more details, see Overview of Docker Compose.
Pull requests are welcome, especially if you want to add another distribution or OS to the list of builds. All support maintaining the existing configuration or these packages is greatly appreciated.