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Make sure you are running Ubuntu version 20.04 or above. Otherwise you may have SP 2 instead of SP 3 installed. SP 2 is no longer supported.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-shib2

sudo a2enmod shib

Download our sample attribute-map.xml and replace your /etc/shibboleth/attribute-map.xml with downloaded file. Our attribute-map.xml defines all commonly used attributes. 

All attributes except groups defined in attribute-map.xml are released by default to all SP. Attribute "groups" is released on demand. Please specify your group names in Shibboleth Integration Request form. Shibboleth IDP doesn't support nested groups( for example group B is a member of group A, user C is a member of group B, IDP doesn't know user C is a member of group A) . If you have to use nested group, you need to convert nested group to dynamic group.

Download our sample shibboleth2.xml and replace your /etc/shibboleth/shibboleth2.xml with downloaded file. Open shibboleth2.xml in a text editor.

• Update SP entityID:

 Find  Search <ApplicationDefaults entityID="https://mysite.cit.cornell.edu/shibboleth"... >.  EntityID is the  Unique identifier for your SP. Cornell Shibboleth Identity Provider(IDP) provides service to many applications. This entityID will help Cornell IDP to identify your SP. We recommend you follow shibboleth convention named it "https://xxx/shibboleth". It's better not include space or special characters in it( / and : are fine). One SP can server multiple sites in your Apache so it does not necessarily equate to the hostname(s) at which your service runs. 

• Update SP session:
  Search <Sessions lifetime="28800" timeout="3600" ...>

--- lifetime is the maximum duration in seconds that a session maintained by the SP will be valid.The settings shown in the example will set your Shibboleth session lifetime to 28800 (8 hours). The maximum session lifetime you can set is 36000 (10 hours).

--- timeout is the maximum inactivity allowed between requests in a session maintained by the SP. The settings shown in the example will set your Shibboleth session timeout to 3600 (1 hour).

 --- postData="ss:mem" postTemplate="postTemplate.html" postLimit="1048576"

Add it to <Sessions ..> if your website hosts web form(with Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded). Web form POST data with Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded will be saved in the Shibboleth memory cache rather than discarded when a user requires authentication after filling out a web form. "postTemplate.html" is located in /etc/shibboleth directory. Modify it to meet your website's style. "postLimit" is the maximum number of bytes to allow when saving off POST data. Over this limit, a warning in the log will appear, but the data will not be saved. When not defined it uses the default which is 1048576 bytes(1024k).

More information: https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SP3/Sessions

• Update the support contact: 

Find  Search < Errors supportContact ="root@localhost"  helpLocation ="/about.html" styleSheet ="/shibboleth-sp/main.css"  /> . Change the email address to your application's support email address. Change the helpLocation to your application's help page.

• Update IDP info if you are configuring a test/dev site( skip this if you are configuring production site )

Find <MetadataProvider ... url=" https://shibidp.cit.cornell.edu/idp/shibboleth " ..>. This is production IDP's metadata url. Comment out this block for your test site. Then un-comment MetadataProvider for Cornell test IDP.

• redirectLimit if needed

After you run the commands, four files are created: sp-encrypt-cert.pem, sp-encrypt-key.pem, sp-signing-cert.pem, sp-signing-key.pem. These files should be owned by shibd. 

NOTE: Signing and encryption certificates are included in your SP's metadata. You should preserve these four files and put them back when you do a fresh SP rebuild using Docker or other container software. 

Navigate to  https://yoursiteDomain/Shibboleth.sso/Metadata and download it.Open your downloaded file with text editor. Some browser doesn't show metadata correctly in the browser. DO NOT copy the content in the browser. Make sure the entityID is the same as your defined in shibboleth2.xml. If there are multiple sites in Apache require Shibboleth authentication, you can get SP's metadata by navigating to one of the site,  then you need to manually add assertion consumer service url for all HTTP-POST bindings for each of the other sites in your SP's metadata. You may see other AssertionConsumerService bindings, 'SingleLogoutService', 'ArtifactResolutionService' etc in your downloaded metadata. . Those are not being used. You don't need to add those for other sites.

In our example, SP's metadata can be obtained from https://shibtest.cit.cornell.edu/Shibboleth.sso/Metadata. In the metadata there should be a line:
<md:AssertionConsumerService Binding="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bindings:HTTP-POST" Location="https://shibtest.cit.cornell.edu/Shibboleth.sso/SAML2/POST" index="1"/>
 
Our example also haveThere is another site mytest.cit.cornell.edu, another hosted in the same Apache. Another AssertionConsumerService url for mytest.cit.cornell.edu need to be manually added in the metadata:
<md:AssertionConsumerService Binding="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bindings:HTTP-POST" Location="https://mytest.cit.cornell.edu/Shibboleth.sso/SAML2/POST" index="2"/>