You can use an identity broker like https://fusionauth.io/ (disclosure, I work for them) to ease the pain. We put a dev friendly wrapper over SAML connections, among other functionality.

Here's our IdP docs: https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/samlv2/

Here's our SP docs: https://fusionauth.io/docs/v1/tech/identity-providers/samlv2...