An OpenID is in the form of a unique URL, and is authenticated by the user's 'OpenID provider' (that is, the entity hosting their OpenID URL).The OpenID protocol does not rely on a central authority to authenticate a user's identity. Since neither the OpenID protocol nor Web sites requiring identification may mandate a specific type of authentication, non-standard forms of authentication can be used, such as smart cards, biometrics, or ordinary passwords.

While you can create an identity on various providers websites (it's possible you already have one see Get an Openid) you may want to host your own identity server.

There are a lot of identities servers, in various languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, Java...) i've decided to use SimpleID a lightweight PHP-based solution which doesn't rely on any database. Here is an overview of these features :

• Support for OpenID 1.1 and 2.0
• Support for Simple Registration Extension 1.0 and 1.1 draft
• Multiple identities support

Installation

Start by downloading the archive at Sourceforge, extract it then move the cache, identities, www folders to your webserver.
Configure your Web Server (apache, lighttpd...) by adding a new virtualhost pointing to the "www" folder. For standard use, you don't need to setup any rewrite rule or anything else.
Rename config.default.inc to config.inc, then edit this file to put correct paths for the different needed folders
 

Add an Identity

Create an identity file called "yournickname.identity" in the identities folder, your apache/lighttpd user must have read access to this file.

identity=http://vhost.yourdomain.tld
pass=3408cad97ec7f9c09775da84048ecc0
[sreg]
nickname=your_nickname
email=yourmail@domain.tld
administrator=1
fullname=John Doe
dob=1957-01-02
gender=M
postcode=1234
country=ch
language=en
timezone=Europe/Zurich

As for the "pass" line, you have to put the MD5 Hash of your password.

That's all, you can now login to SimpleID using your new identity, and use this identity to login in various websites.