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.