Shibboleth Authentication for Moodle
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Requirements:
- Moodle 1.5 or later. Versions prior to 1.5 may also work with Shibboleth
authentication (contact Lukas Haemmerle <haemmerle@switch.ch> for further
instructions)
- Shibboleth target 1.1 or later. See documentation for your Shibboleth
federation on how to set up Shibboleth.
- Modifications to login process by Martin Dougiamas
Moodle Configuration with Dual login
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1. Ensure that the .htaccess file in moodle/auth/shibboleth/ is active
It may be possible that you have to change the configuration of your web
server to allow .htaccess files to override certain settings. Alternatively,
you also could define the rules from the .htaccess file in the web server
configuration file.
2. Protect the file moodle/auth/shibboleth/shib-protected.php with Shibboleth.
This page just needs to redirect the users to moodle/auth/shibboleth/
For Apache you have to define a rule like the following:
--
<Location ~ "/auth/shibboleth/shib-protected.php">
AuthType shibboleth
ShibRequireSession On
require valid-user
</Location>
--
To restrict access to Moodle, replace the access rule 'require valid-user'
with something that fits your needs, e.g. 'require affiliation student'.
3. As Moodle admin, go to the 'Administrations >> Users >> Authentication
Options' and select the 'Shibboleth' authentication method from the pop-up.
4. Fill in the fields of the form. The fields 'Username', 'First name',
'Surname', etc should contain the name of the environment variables of the
Shibboleth attributes that you want to map onto the corresponding Moodle
variable (e.g. 'HTTP_SHIB_PERSON_SURNAME' for the person's last name, refer
the Shibboleth documentation or the documentation of your Shibboleth
federation for information on which attributes are available).
Especially the 'Username' field is of great importance because
this attribute is used for the Moodle authentication of Shibboleth users.
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Shibboleth Attributes needed by Moodle:
For Moodle to work properly Shibboleth should at least provide the attributes
that are used as username, firstname, lastname and email in Moodle.
The attribute used for the username has to be unique for all Shibboleth user.
All attributes must obey a certain length, otherwise Moodle cuts off the
ends. Consult the Moodle documentation for further information on the maximum
lengths for each field in the user profile.
#############################################################################
5. The large text field 'Instructions' must contain a link to the
moodle/auth/shibboleth/shib-protected.php file which is protected by
Shibboleth (see step 2) and causes the Shibboleth login procedure to start.
You also coudl use HTML code in that field, e.g. to create your own
Shibboleth login button.
6. Save the changes for the Shibboleth authentication method.
Moodle Configuration with Shibboleth only login
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If you want Shibboleth as your only authentication method, configure Moodle as
described in the dual login section above and do the following steps:
5.a On the Moodle Shibboleth settings page, set the 'Alternate Login URL' to
the URL of the file 'moodle/auth/shibboleth/shib-protected.php'
This will enforce Shibboleth login.
How the Shibboleth authentication works
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For a user to get Shibboleth authenticated in Moodle he first must go to the
Shibboleth-protected page shib-protected.php. If Shibboleth authentication is
enabled this happens automatically when a user wants to login.
Otherwise the user has to click on the link on the login page you provided in
step 5.
If the user is successfully Shibboleth authenticated he is redirected to
moodle/auth/shibboleth where he also gets authenticated in Moodle.
Moodle basically checks whether the Shibboleth attribute that you mapped
as the username is present. This attribute is only present if a user is
Shibboleth authenticated.
If the user's Moodle account has not existed yet, it gets automatically created.
Unless the user's firstname, last name and email address is provided, the user
is automatically redirected to the edit profile page by Moodle.
To prevent that every Shibboleth user can access your Moodle site you have to
adapt the 'require valid-user' line in your webserver's config (see step 2) to
allow only specific users.
You can use Shibboleth AND another authentication method (it was tested with
manual login only). So if there are a few users that don't have a Shibboleth
login, you could create manual accounts for them and they could use the manual
login. For other authentication methods you first have to configure them and
then set Shibboleth as your authentication method. Users can log in only via one authentication method unless they have two accounts in Moodle.
Shibboleth dual login with custom login page
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Of course you can create a dual login page that better fits your needs. For this
to work you have to set up the two authentication methods (e.g. 'Manual' and
'Shibboleth', Shibboleth has to be the current authentication method) and
specify an alternate login link to your own dual login page. On that page you
basically need a link to the Shibboleth-protected page
('moodle/auth/shibboleth/shib-protected.php') for the Shibboleth login and a
form that sends 'username' and 'password' to moodle/login/index.php.
Consult the Moodle documentation for further instructions and requirements.
Bugs
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The current implementation has not yet been extensively tested. So there may be
bugs. Please send bug reports concerning the Shibboleth part to
Lukas Haemmerle <haemmerle@switch.ch>
So far there is one bug known concerning Shibboleth although it's not a bug
caused by the Shibboleth authentication but a general bug.
- If certain user profile fields are locked, users may not be able to update
their user profile at all because Moodle complains that certain locked values
were tried to change. This bug has to do with the disabling of the locked form
fields and will hopefully somewhen get fixed. Therefore it is not yet
recommended to lock the user fields.
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In case of problems and questions with Shibboleth authentication, contact
Lukas Haemmerle <haemmerle@switch.ch> or Markus Hagman <hagman@hytti.uku.fi>
exe-cutor