How to configure SimpleSAMLphp with Acquia platform? - apache

Question

I'm following the instruction on Acquia's site https://docs.acquia.com/articles/using-simplesamlphp-acquia-cloud-site about configuring SimpleSAMLphp and it just seems the documentation is not very precise. In their documentation it says to run the following command to install SimpleSAMLphp library.
cd docroot; ln -s ../simplesamlphp/www simplesaml
And to install the Install the simplesamlphp_auth Drupal module, they linked to the simpleSAMLphp Authentication page, https://www.drupal.org/project/simplesamlphp_auth. And in the SimpleSAMLphp Installation, it's linked to the SimpleSAMLphp Installation and Configuration page, https://simplesamlphp.org/docs/stable/simplesamlphp-install. However, the instruction in this page looks just like what I've done in the second step of Acquia's documentation. Instead of extract the simplesamlphp-1.x.y alongside the docroot, it suggest to extract it inside the var folder.
Now, once I've gone through the instruction on Acquia's documentation and tried to access the simplesaml, https://mywebsite.dd:8443/simplesaml/, I got the following error:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /simplesaml/ on this server.
So I found this thread, Getting a 403 forbidden error for simplesaml after Apache upgrade, that talks about the error which looks like step 6 in the SimpleSAMLphp Installation and Configuration instruction. So I went to the /Applications/DevDesktop/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and configured the following:
<VirtualHost *:8083>
ServerAdmin userName#mywebsite.com
DocumentRoot "/Users/userName/sites/drupalsites/docroot"
ServerName drupalsites.local
ServerAlias drupalsites.local
ErrorLog "logs/drupalsites-error_log"
CustomLog "logs/drupalsites-access_log" common
<Directory "/Users/userName/sites/drupalsites/docroot">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
Alias /simplesaml simplesamlphp/www
<Directory "/Users/userName/sites/drupalsites/simplesamlphp/www">
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
However, I'm still getting the same error.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /simplesaml/ on this server.
So, the questions are, did I go about installing SimpleSAMLphp the wrong way? Second, if not, where did I go wrong? Third, how do I resolve this error and back on track again? I have also found this documentation, https://www.chapterthree.com/blog/how-to-configure-simplesamlphp-for-drupal-8-on-acquia, that talks about setting up SimpleSAMLphp on Aquia's plaform but it's not very consistent with other documentations I've listed above. So, I'm not sure which I should follow. Any suggestion is much appreciated.

Answer 1

try adding this to your docroot/.htaccess
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/simplesaml

Answer 2

To be more precise with #realgt answer :
# Copy and adapt this rule to directly execute PHP files in contributed or
# custom modules or to run another PHP application in the same directory.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/core/modules/statistics/statistics.php$
+ # Allow access to simplesaml paths
+ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/simplesaml
# Deny access to any other PHP files that do not match the rules above.
RewriteRule "^.+/.*\.php$" - [F]
This is provided in this link :
https://www.chapterthree.com/blog/how-to-configure-simplesamlphp-for-drupal-8-on-acquia