I have previously talked about configuring a Drupal site to authenticate against a remote SimpleSAMLphp install, but as Drupal is an excellent user management system I wanted to turn it around and use Drupal as the identity provider. This means that Drupal would allow users to log into other systems using their Drupal username and password by leveraging the power of SimpleSAMLphp.

This can be accomplished by wrapping the Drupal site and SimpleSAMLphp together along with a couple of modules to power the communication between the two systems.

The same terms apply as I described in the previous post, but to reiterate their meaning in this context I will go over them again.

SP – Service Provider – This is the system that users are trying to log into, which in this setup is some other site or service. Service providers will generally create a local user to track the user within the site and in this setup the user will be a Drupal user.

IdP – Identity Provider – The Drupal system holds information about the users and is therefore called an identity provider as it provides the identity of the user. This is used by the Service Provider (SP) to authenticate the user.

I’m going to assume that you have a Drupal site already installed via composer, preferably using the Drupal recommended composer file. This will be basis of the rest of the article.

Installing SimpleSAMLphp

To get this working we need to require SimpleSAMLphp in the same project as you Drupal site. The first step, therefore, is to require SimpleSAMLphp as a project dependency, which will install SimpleSAMLphp alongside Drupal.

Read more.