shib-keygen8

Usage

Overview

Generate a self-signed X.509 certificate for a Shibboleth SP. By default, the certificate will be for the local fully-qualified (as returned by "hostname --fqdn") hostname. An entity ID can be specified with the -e flag. The openssl command-line client is used to generate the key pair. By default, the public certificate will be created in /etc/shibboleth/sp-cert.pem and the private key in /etc/shibboleth/sp-key.pem.

Options

-b

Batch mode: exit successfully without doing anything if sp-key.pem or sp-cert.pem already exists, unless -f was also specified. Suppress standard error output from openssl when creating the certificate.

-e entity-id

Add entity-id (which should be a URI) as an alternative name for the certificate.

-f

Remove sp-cert.pem and sp-key.pem before generating a new certificate. Without this option, if those files already exist, shib-keygen prints an error and exits rather than overwriting them.

-g group

After generating the key and certificate, change the group ownership of the key file to this group. By default, the group used is "_shibd".

-h hostname

Specify the fully-qualified domain name for which to generate a certificate. If this option isn't given, the hostname defaults to the result of "hostname --fqdn".

-o output-dir

Store sp-cert.pem and sp-key.pem in the directory output-dir rather than the default of /etc/shibboleth.

-n prefix

Use prefix instead of sp in the name of the generated certificate and private key file.

-u user

After generating the key and certificate, change the ownership of the key file to this user. This is used to allow the key to be read by a non-root user so that shibd can be run as a non-root user. By default, the key is owned by "_shibd".

-y years

The number of years for which the certificate should be valid. The default expiration time is ten years into the future.

Files

/etc/shibboleth/sp-cert.cnf

The OpenSSL configuration file used for generating the self-signed certificate. This configuration file is generated when the script is run and deleted afterwards.

/etc/shibboelth/sp-cert.pem

The default location of the public certificate created by this script.

/etc/shibboleth/sp-key.pem

The default location of the private key for the certificate created by this script.

These three files are stored in the directory given with -o instead, if that option is given.