CAS on Windows: localhost setup in 5 mins

1. January 4, 2010

   CAS (Central Authentication System) is a simple, secure single sign-on system. In my experience connecting CareerHub to university login systems, I love it when unis use CAS because it’s so elegantly simple to integrate with.

   

   If you need to test CAS authentication in a Windows development environment, these step-by-step instructions should get you running in about 5 minutes.

   1. Download Tomcat, extract to any folder.
   2. Run [tomcat_folder]\bin\startup.bat to start Tomcat. If you get an error about JAVA_HOME or JRE_HOME, set one of those environment variables, e.g:
      SET JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6
      (I added this to my startup.bat file so it isn’t set system wide)
   3. Download the CAS zip file, grab the .WAR file from cas-server-[version]\modules and put it in [tomcat_folder]\webapps - it should take a while to copy and then you should see a new folder appear: [tomcat_folder]\webapps\cas-server-webapp-[version].
   4. Go to http://localhost:8080/cas-server-webapp-[version], you should see a CAS login page.
   5. By default, CAS comes configured to use a simple authentication handler where it accepts any login attempts where the username (NetID) and password are the same - so try logging in with username “test”, password “test” or similar.
   6. If you don’t want to mess around with configuring SSL for Tomcat, disable secure cookies for CAS by editing [cas-webapp]\WEB-INF\spring-configuration\ticketGrantingTicketCookieGenerator.xml and setting p:cookieSecure="false".

   Done! That’s all there is to it. You can now get busy integrating your application with this test server. If you haven’t integrated a website with a CAS server before, don’t worry - it’s almost a no-brainer.

   If you want to quickly specify some username/password combos, you can replace this SimpleTestUsernamePasswordAuthenticationHandler with one of the generic authentication handlers in [tomcat_folder]\webapps\cas-server-webapp-[version]\WEB-INF\deployerConfigContext.xml.

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