Local Metadata Management Tools

[Peter Schober]

* Helen Feder <hrf at andrew.cmu.edu> [2018-02-14 21:15]:
> We would like a tool that has an API that can be called from scripts
> that are building our VMs.
> Also would be nice if it had a  webapp for use by  our central group
> to enter relevant bits of metadata that the tool then validates and
> saves and then published out to our IdPs.  Eventually would like to
> have a self-service webapp with local sysadmins can upload their
> metadata and then our central group approves it and then it gets
> published out to our IdPs automatically.

Not sure anything existing will do all of that, but in terms of FLOSS
with a self-service web UI I think this mostly boils down to Jagger[1]
or PEER[2]. There certainly will have been other wheel-reinventers but
I'm not aware of them having shared/opened up their tools.
(Most federations[3] probably have written their own thing at some point.)

Jagger decomposes metadata into individual data elements, storing the
pieces in a custom schema in an RDBMS (reassembling them for output)
and has custom web forms and business logic for all editing
jobs. GEANT has spent some effort a few years back trying to make the
UI more consistent.
PEER takes a more document-oriented approach and uses git as backend,
but the included JavaScript metadata editor[4] is a bit weird, has a
few mis-features and could generally use some love (or replacing[5]).
I'm not aware of either tool having published APIs.

Other than that: I recall the UKfederation announcing in 2016 to
invest in creating their own tool (obligatory xkcd reference
https://xkcd.com/927/) that will have APIs plus a web UI.
Here's an archived presentation[6] of that (relevant part starts at
42:10) as well as the slides used[7].

HTH,
-peter

[1] https://jagger.heanet.ie/
[2] https://github.com/Emergya/peer cf. https://reep.refeds.org/
[3] https://refeds.org/federations
[4] https://github.com/Emergya/saml-metadata-editor/#abstract
[5] http://samlmetajs.simplesamlphp.org/ may no longer be a viable option.
[6] https://tnc16.geant.org/web/media/archive/4A
[7] https://tnc16.geant.org/core/presentation/680