WAR Overlay Installation

CAS installation is a fundamentally source-oriented process, and we recommend a WAR overlay (1) project to organize customizations such as component configuration and UI design. The output of a WAR overlay build is a cas.war file that can be deployed to a servlet container like Tomcat.

What is a WAR Overlay?

Overlays are a strategy to combat repetitive code and/or resources. Rather than downloading the CAS codebase and building from source, overlays allow you to download a pre-built vanilla CAS web application server provided by the project itself and override/insert specific behavior into it. At build time, the Maven/Gradle installation process will attempt to download the provided binary artifact first. Then the tool will locate your configuration files and settings made available inside the same project directory and will merge those into the downloaded artifact in order to produce one wholesome archive (i.e. cas.war) . Overriden artifacts may include resources, java classes, images, CSS and javascript files. In order for the merge process is successfully execute, the location and names of the overriden artifacts locally must EXACTLY match that of those provided by the project inside the originally downloaded archive.

It goes without saying that while up-front ramp-up time could be slightly complicated, there are significant advantages to this approach:

1. There is no need to download/build from the source.
2. Upgrades are tremedously easier in most cases by simply adjusting the build script to download the newer CAS release.
3. Rather than hosting the entire software source code, as the deployer you ONLY keep your own local customizations which makes change tracking much easier.
4. Tracking changes inside a source control repository is very lightweight, again simply because only relevant changes (and not the entire software) is managed.

WAR overlay projects are provided for reference and study.

Gradle

• CAS Gradle Overlay

Maven

• CAS Maven Overlay

Docker

• See this guide for more info.

Every aspect of CAS can be controlled by adding, removing, or modifying files in the overlay; it’s also possible and indeed common to customize the behavior of CAS by adding third-party components that implement CAS APIs as Java source files or dependency references.

Servlet Container

CAS can be deployed to a number of servlet containers. See this guide for more info.

Spring Configuration

CAS server depends heavily on the Spring framework. Two modes of configuration are available. Note that both modes can be used at the same time.

XML

There is a src/main/resources/deployerConfigContext.xml which CAS adopters may include in the overlay for environment-specific CAS settings. Note that in most cases, modifying this file should be unnecessary.

Groovy

The CAS application context is able to load a src/main/resources/deployerConfigContext.groovy. For advanced use cases, CAS beans can be dynamically defined via the Groovy programming language. As an example, here is an exampleBean:

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beans {
    xmlns([context:'http://www.springframework.org/schema/context'])
    xmlns([lang:'http://www.springframework.org/schema/lang'])
    xmlns([util:'http://www.springframework.org/schema/util'])

    exampleBean(org.apereo.cas.example.ExampleBean) {
        beanProperty = propertyValue
    }
}

Additionally, dynamic reloadable Groovy beans can be defined in the src/main/resources/deployerConfigContext.xml. These definitions are directly read from a .groovy script which is monitored for changes and reloaded automatically. Here is a dynamic messenger bean defined whose definition is read from a Messenger.groovy file, and is monitored for changes every 5 seconds.

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<lang:groovy id="messenger"
    refresh-check-delay="5000" 
    script-source="classpath:Messenger.groovy">
    <lang:property name="message" value="Hello, CAS!" />
</lang:groovy>

The contents of the Messenger.groovy must resolve to a valid Java class:

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class ExampleMessenger implements Messenger {
    String message = "Welcome"
    
    String getMessage() {
        this.message
    }
    void setMessage(String message) {
        this.message = message
    }
}

Custom and Third-Party Source

It is common to customize or extend the functionality of CAS by developing Java components that implement CAS APIs or to include third-party source by Maven dependency references. Including third-party source is trivial; simply include the relevant dependency in the overlay pom.xml or build.gradle file. In order to include custom Java source, it should be included under a src/java/main directory in the overlay project source tree.

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├── src
│   ├── main
│   │   ├── java
│   │   │   └── edu
│   │   │       └── vt
│   │   │           └── middleware
│   │   │               └── cas
│   │   │                   ├── audit
│   │   │                   │   ├── CompactSlf4jAuditTrailManager.java
│   │   │                   ├── authentication
│   │   │                   │   └── principal
│   │   │                   │       └── UsernamePasswordCredentialsToPrincipalResolver.java
│   │   │                   ├── services
│   │   │                   │   └── JsonServiceRegistryDao.java
│   │   │                   ├── util
│   │   │                   │   └── X509Helper.java
│   │   │                   └── web
│   │   │                       ├── HelpController.java
│   │   │                       ├── flow
│   │   │                       │   ├── AbstractForgottenCredentialAction.java
│   │   │                       └── util
│   │   │                           ├── ProtocolParameterAuthority.java

Maven Caveat

Also, note that for any custom Java component to compile and be included in the final cas.war file, the pom.xml in the Maven overlay must include a reference to the Maven Java compiler so classes can compile.

Here is a sample Maven build configuration:

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...

<build>
    <plugins>
...
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>3.1</version>
            <configuration>
                <source>${java.source.version}</source>
                <target>${java.target.version}</target>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
...
    </plugins>
    <finalName>cas</finalName>
</build>

Dependency Management

Each release of CAS provides a curated list of dependencies it supports. In practice, you do not need to provide a version for any of these dependencies in your build configuration as the CAS distribution is managing that for you. When you upgrade CAS itself, these dependencies will be upgraded as well in a consistent way.

The curated list of dependencies contains a refined list of third party libraries. The list is available as a standard Bills of Materials (BOM).

To configure your project to inherit from the BOM, simply set the parent:

Maven

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<parent>
    <groupId>org.apereo.cas</groupId>
    <artifactId>cas-server-support-bom</artifactId>
    <version>${cas.version}</version>
</parent>

Not everyone likes inheriting from the BOM. You may have your own corporate standard parent that you need to use, or you may just prefer to explicitly declare all your Maven configuration.

If you don’t want to use the cas-server-support-bom, you can still keep the benefit of the dependency management (but not the plugin management) by using a scope=import dependency:

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<dependencyManagement>
     <dependencies>
     
        <!-- Override a dependency by including it BEFORE the BOM -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.group</groupId>
            <artifactId>artifact-name</artifactId>
            <version>X.Y.Z</version>
        </dependency>
             
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apereo.cas</groupId>
            <artifactId>cas-server-support-bom</artifactId>
            <version>${cas.version}</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

Gradle

To take advantage of the CAS BOM via Gradle, please use this guide and configure the Gradle build accordingly.

(1) http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/overlays.html