06 Oct 2014

SimpleSAMLphp and Vanilla jsConnect

Recently I have been looking into setting up a forum that uses a federated SAML login for authentication. When you say forum these days, your choices are kind of limited to a myriad of PHP solutions. There are a lot of solutions out there, with classics such as phpBB, simple machines 2, and myBB. Then there are “newcomers” such as vanilla forums, and even discourse. Granted discourse it is more of a community tool than a forum, and it not written in PHP.

Normally I have had a tendency to roll my own forum software when I need the functionality. In this case though this would be a bit of an overkill, especially since it doesn’t need to interact with anything. Except for a SAML based login.

30 Sep 2014

Embedding simpleSAMLphp using nginx

I recently had to embed simpleSAMLphp into another application, in order to provide SAML2 federate login. Well embed might be the wrong term, perhaps mount describes it better.

As my web server of choice these days is nginx I wanted to use it rather than apache. This posed a couple of problems, so I decided to document my endeavour, mostly because I have been through this process once before and it turns out my memory is not really that good.