Configuring Your IdP to Access Canvas Through the SSO Proxy

Setting Up Your College or District IdP to Route Through the Proxy

This document illustrates configuring your Canvas to route your college/district IdP through the SSO proxy. To do that, the following values will need to be updated in order to implement this change:

• IdP entityID:  this will change to the proxy entityID
• Log On URL: this will change to a URL that goes to the proxy SSO endpoint, and with a ?source= query argument identifying the college/district IdP to route to
• Certificate fingerprint: this will become the certificate fingerprint of the proxy signing certificate
• Note: the Logout URL, if you want the user logged out of your IdP after logging out of Canvas, will be same as below. The proxy will not keep a session, so you will need to configure Canvas to send the user to your IdP's Logout endpoint.

Set Up Requires Canvas Administrative Privileges

Each college using Canvas has one or two people who have been established as the "Canvas Administrators" for that college. The person(s) in this role has access to their Canvas site with "administrative privileges", including being able to configure how authentication is done for their Canvas site. This individual will need to make the changes outlined in this document. 

Canvas recommends that you first implement these changes in your Test/Beta site and ensure it is working correctly there prior to configuring it in your Production site. Please be aware that every few weeks, Instructure replaces your Test/Beta site config with your Production config, so you might have to repeat configuring the steps below multiple times if it takes longer to complete your verification testing.

Canvas Configuration Steps

Step 1- Click on "Authentication" in the left-hand pane of this screen: 

Then click on SAML in the right-hand side of the subsequent screen:

That will bring you to the main "SAML configuration form". The following information should be placed in the fields: 

* Login attribute: eduPersonPrincipalName

                 Or eduPersonPrincipalName (domain stripped) if you don't include the @campus.edu on the identifier you send to Canvas in the provisioning feed.

 

* Identifier Format:  urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:nameid-format:transient

Choose the above value from the drop-down and Save your changes. The drop-down should have the following set of choices:

Testing in the Canvas Test Environment (Pilot)

Testing should occur on the Test/Beta site that has been established for your college. An example of a test url is: https://ccsf.test.instructure.com/login/saml    You will need to replace the correct values associated to your college test site in order to successfully test the changes. 

Start at your equivalent of: https://ccsf.test.instructure.com/login/saml

Test Site:  To configure your testing URL, https://[your domain].test.instructure.com/login/saml

Beta Site: To configure your beta test URL:  https://[your domain].beta.instructure.com/login/saml

Note:  You can test in either your "beta" or "test" environments.  

Confirm Success and Move to Production Testing

Contacts

SSO Proxy Project Team