Notes on updating a Shibboleth 1.2 IdP to software version 1.2.1.

  • Acquire the new software and unpack it into a directory called shibboleth-origin-1.2.1.
  • Pick out the new shibboleth.war from the dist/ subdirectory.
  • Take a copy of your old shibboleth webapp, which is to say a copy of the directory tree webapps/shibboleth from your Tomcat installation: 
 mkdir save
 cp -r webapps/shibboleth save/shibboleth
  • In most cases, you really only need the webapps/shibboleth/WEB-INF/classes/conf subtree in the previous step. Better to be safe than sorry, though.
  • Undeploy the old shibboleth webapp. One way to do this is to stop Tomcat and remove both webapps/shibboleth.war (if there is one) and the webapps/shibboleth tree. You can do this without halting Tomcat if you use the Tomcat Web Application Manager GUI (normally on port 8080) and poke the "undeploy" link on the application.
  • Deploy the new version by copying the new shibboleth.war into the webapps directory. You should make sure that shibboleth.war is readable by the tomcat4 user, either by changing its group to tomcat4 or setting it world-readable. You will know you've done the right thing when you look in the webapps directory and see that there is a shibboleth subdirectory again.
  • Refresh the application list in the Tomcat Web Application Manager GUI and observe that shibboleth has reappeared, and is running.
  • Stop the shibboleth webapp.
  • Copy the old configuration over the default one, saying "y" when it asks about overwriting: 
 cp -r save/shibboleth/WEB-INF/classes/conf webapps/shibboleth/WEB-INF/classes
  • Start the shibboleth webapp using the Tomcat Web Application Manager GUI.
  • You're done!