Hello, As a new user of CAS, I'd like to voice my opinion that the official documentation of how one can get started with CAS is just awful. By this I mean not the lack of it, but rather how indirect, not step-by-step it is. Clarity could often be improved too.
In the end I managed to do what I hoped for, ie investigate CAS locally as an SSO solution, for which I needed to (1) run CAS server locally, (2) connect and authenticate using a simple CAS client locally, (3) run the service management app. However, the difficulty I had at most steps of getting it all to work make me really want to use something else even if I have to implement parts of it from scratch.. Only now, when wanting to post this message, did I find this helpful guide: https://dacurry-tns.github.io/deploying-apereo-cas/ Could the CAS team incorporate some step-by-step tutorial like this into the official documentation? These threads seem to voice a similar concern: https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/forum/#!searchin/cas-user/documentation/cas-user/z3BLJ0IQwZ0/wRybEK1LAQAJ https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/forum/#!searchin/cas-user/documentation/cas-user/qaAINooFi1s/D3k7Pr-7BQAJ I'm also posting the notes I made for myself during the process. I wouldn't have written them if there was something like this available in official docs, or I had found the unofficial guide earlier. I'm adding **** to points that took me particularly long to figure out. *Building* - Described here: https://apereo.github.io/cas/developer/Build-Process.html - git clone --depth=1 --single-branch --branch=master [email protected]:apereo/cas.git cas-server - cd cas-server - git checkout master - ./gradlew build install --parallel -x test -x javadoc -x check *Config* - Default config dir is /etc/cas/config (may need to be created, given permissions) If you create application.properties in there, CAS seems to pick them up. **** - You can override in there any properties listed on https://apereo.github.io/cas/development/installation/Configuration-Properties.html *Keys* - keytool -genkey -alias cas -keyalg RSA -validity 999 -keystore /etc/cas/thekeystore -ext san=dns:cas-sso.local - Add 127.0.0.1 cas-sso.local to /etc/hosts - keytool -export -file /etc/cas/config/cas.crt -keystore /etc/cas/thekeystore -alias cas - sudo keytool -import -file /etc/cas/config/cas.crt -alias cas -keystore $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/security/cacerts (default password to cacerts is changeit) - Add the following lines to application.properties in CAS config dir (with whatever password you set up for /etc/cas/thekeystore) **** server.ssl.keyStorePassword=qwer1234 server.ssl.keyPassword=qwer1234 *Adding JSON service registry (to get a sample client registered)* - Add line >>compile "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-json-service-registry:5.2.0-SNAPSHOT"<< to the file cas-server/webapp/cas-server-webapp-tomcat/build.gradle, replacing 5.2.0-SNAPSHOT with whatever version of CAS you have. The version can be figured out after starting CAS (is displayed). **** - Recompile the whole thing as above. - Add the following lines to application.properties in CAS config dir: **** cas.serviceRegistry.watcherEnabled=true cas.serviceRegistry.repeatInterval=10 cas.serviceRegistry.startDelay=1 cas.serviceRegistry.initFromJson=true - Add json file with service defs in directory cas-server/webapp/resources/services (the server seems to display which directory it watches after start). { "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.RegexRegisteredService", "serviceId" : "http://localhost/.*";, **** "name" : "testId", "id" : 1, "accessStrategy" : { "@class" : "org.apereo.cas.services.DefaultRegisteredServiceAccessStrategy", "enabled" : true, "ssoEnabled" : true } } *Getting access to /status/dashboard endpoint ***** - Add the following lines to application.properties in CAS config dir: cas.adminPagesSecurity.ip=127\.0\.0\.1 cas.monitor.endpoints.enabled=true cas.monitor.endpoints.sensitive=false *Running* - cd webapp/cas-server-webapp-tomcat - ../../gradlew build bootRun --parallel *Simple client* - git clone [email protected]:apereo/phpCAS.git - cd phpCAS - Copy docs/examples/config.example.php to docs/examples/config.php and edit: // Full Hostname of your CAS Server $cas_host = 'cas-sso.local'; // Context of the CAS Server $cas_context = '/cas'; // Port of your CAS server. Normally for a https server it's 443 $cas_port = 8443; - Make the file docs/examples/example_simple.php accessible by www. - Navigate to http://localhost/phpCAS/docs/examples/example_simple.php *Service management app* - Based on https://github.com/apereo/cas-services-management-overlay - git clone [email protected]:apereo/cas-services-management-overlay.git - cd cas-services-management-overlay - ./build.sh package - This creates target/cas-management.war, which should be deployed to Tomcat. Make sure Tomcat uses the same Java as CAS server. Otherwise, it won't find the SSL keys in the Java truststore. **** - On first run, it copies various files from cas/config into /etc/cas/config. You may want to update management.properties as follows, in particular: # CAS server that management app will authenticate with # This server will authenticate for any app (service) and you can login as casuser/Mellon cas.server.name: https://cas-sso.local:8443/ cas.server.prefix: https://cas-sso.local:8443/cas cas.mgmt.adminRoles[0]=ROLE_ADMIN cas.mgmt.userPropertiesFile=file:/etc/cas/config/users.properties # Update this URL to point at server running this management app cas.mgmt.serverName=http://localhost:8080 server.context-path=/cas-management server.port=8080 logging.config=file:/etc/cas/config/log4j2-management.xml - http://localhost:8080/cas-management *Conclusions* - Really painful to set up. - CAS documentation is very unclear, tons of linked documents, not sure where to find information. - Wonder if better to do OAuth2 even if redirecting to Google / FB needs to be implemented from scratch. --- With all that, thank you for writing and maintaining this software. It does seem like a good choice for SSO solutions - but the initial learning curve shouldn't be quite so sharp. Jan -- - Website: https://apereo.github.io/cas - Gitter Chatroom: https://gitter.im/apereo/cas - List Guidelines: https://goo.gl/1VRrw7 - Contributions: https://goo.gl/mh7qDG --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CAS Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/d/msgid/cas-user/0d6365c9-ce06-496a-b53d-6702ec1f0551%40apereo.org.
