Shibboleth User Authenticator for JupyterHub

This is an implementation of a Shibboleth User Authenticator. The authenticator needs a special proxy (e.g. nginx) which implements the shibboleth authorisation as a service provider, serving the /Shibboleth.sso/* commands and pass all other addresses to the jupyterhub proxy.

This package is the extracting the data from the shibboleth authorisation process and is performing the login process in the jupyterhub.

Shibboleth creates some extra cookies (depending on the configuration), e.g. remote_user . Ususally the remote_user is a complete email address 'username @ domain'. Jupyterhub uses only a username. In some configurations you can get additional cookie entries e.g. the uid which can be used in jupyterhub.

This package can be installed with pip either from a local git repository or from PyPi.

Installation from local git repository:

cd jhub_shibboleth_user_authenticator
pip install .

Installation from PyPi:

pip install jhub_shibboelth_user_authenticator

Alternately, you can add the local project folder must be on your PYTHONPATH.

Usage with a simple jupyterhub configuration:

# use the shibboleth authentidcator
c.JupyterHub.authenticator_class = 'jhub_shibboleth_user_authenticator.shibboleth_user_auth.ShibbolethUserAuthenticator

# use a different cookie entry as the user name , remote_user is the default!
c.Authenticator.header_name = 'uid'

# put some extra values in the auth_state for the spawner
# don't forget to activate c.Authenticator.enable_auth_state = True
c.Authenticator.auth_state_header_names = ['mail', 'givenname']

During tests we found some Shibboleth IdPs which don't support Logout-redirections. So, the default:

# define logout page
c.Authenticator.logout_page = '/Shibboleth.sso/Logout?return=/'

was not working. We add an alternative scheme, which is doing the logout process in a hidden iframe:

# activate the alternative logout scheme
c.Authenticator.logout_redirect = False      ä default is True

# add an automatic redirect to the login page (if you want)
c.Authenticator.automatic_redirect = True    # default is False