Quick Start Instructions

There are a lot of options and knobs in pyFF - in many ways pyFF is a toolchain that can be configured to do a lot of tasks. In order to start exploring pyFF it is best to start with a simple example. Assuming you have read the installation instructions and have created and activated a virtualenv with pyFF installed do the following:

First create an empty directory and cd into it. In the directory create a file called edugain.fd with the following contents:

- load:
   - http://mds.edugain.org
- select:
- stats:

Now run pyFF like this:

# pyff edugain.fd

You should see output like this after a few seconds depending on the speed of your Internet connection you should see something like this:

---
total size:     5568
selected:       5567
          idps: 3079
           sps: 2487
---

Congratulations - you have successfully fetched, parsed, selected and printed stats for the edugain metadata feed. This is of course not a useful example (probably) but it illustrates a few points about how pyFF works:

  • pyFF configuration is (mostly) in the form of yaml files

  • The yaml file reprsents a list of instructions which are processed in order

  • The load statement retrieves (and parses) SAML metadata from edugain.org

  • The select statement is used to form an active document on which subsequent instructions operate

  • Finally, the stats statement prints out some information about the current active document.

Next we’ll learn how to do more than print statistics.