If you’re a bit of a tech guy like me, you’ve probably heard something about OpenID. It’s an interesting concept, and I’ve been poking and playing around with it a bit lately. At the moment, there arn’t that many places to use OpenID, but I think that may soon change. OpenID is basically a new and decentralized way of identifying yourself on the Internet. Nowadays, in order to register with a site, you will typically need to at a minimum provide an email address. You then go through a process to verify that you actually “own” that email address, via some sort of emailed verification code. With OpenID, it’s sort of similar in concept, except you use a web address instead of an email address. The verification details are slighty different, and if you’re interested in learning about how it works, a good place to start is Wikipedia.

So how do you actually get and use OpenID? There are a number of sites out there that will allow you to signup for an OpenID, but really, isn’t that sort of defeating the purpose of all this? I don’t want to signup for something just so I can signup for something else. I want to install my own OpenID server, but this turned to be trickier than I would have assumed. Even the main OpenID site doesn’t really have clear instructions on how to setup your own OpenID server.

I was going to write down some steps on what I did to finally get OpenID up and running, but well… I did it last week and I don’t quite remember the details. And I don’t want to try to remember since I’m going on vacation in a couple days, and I want to just get this blog posted before I leave.

So here are the libraries that I downloaded to get OpenID up and running. Note that it’s best if you have shell access to your server, since you’ll have to move around some directories, edit some config files, and perform some sym-linking (ugh). You’ll also need to create a md5 password for the admin user, which if you’re on a Mac, you can easily do with the command md5 -s “password here”, or with the php function.

• PHP-openid-1.2.2.tar.gz
• PHP-server-1.1.tar.gz
• Smarty-2.6.18.tar.gz

It goes without saying that having to download three things in order to get one thing up and running is a pretty big stumbling block towards wider adoption. Bonus points goes to the first person that can package up all these libraries as one singular distribution that I can just upload, hook in the MySQL database info and just go.