This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Matt Parrish. Original Post: Switched to pure ruby ldap library Feed Title: pearware blog - agile web development Feed URL: http://blog.pearware.org/feed/atom.xml Feed Description: Agile web development using Ruby on Rails (and sometimes Java) Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Matt Parrish Latest Posts From pearware blog - agile web development

I wrote an article awhile back about using the Ruby/LDAP library to handle LDAP authentication in Ruby on Rails. I just finished swapping out the LDAP client library in that application from Ruby/LDAP to ruby-net-ldap. The problems with Ruby/LDAP are that it isn’t a GEM, so installation is a bit more difficult, and it relies on a common LDAP library, like OpenLDAP, to already be installed on the system. The ruby-net-ldap library is written in pure Ruby, so no other library needs to be installed on the system.

Here is the new code that performs the authentication:

require "net/ldap" 

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.authenticate(login, password, host, port)
    if login.to_s.length > 0 and password.to_s.length > 0
      ldap = Net::LDAP.new
      ldap.host = host
      ldap.port = port
      ldap.auth = "cn=#{login},cn=users,o=xyz...", password
      if ldap.bin
        return find(:first, :conditions => ['username=?', login])
      else
        return false
      end
    end
  end
end