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.