Recipe13.17.Accessing LDAP Servers

Recipe 13.17. Accessing LDAP Servers

Credit: John Nielsen

Problem

You need to access an LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) server from your Python programs.

Solution

The simplest solution is offered by the freely downloadable third-party extension ldap (http://python-ldap.sourceforge.net). This script shows a few LDAP operations with ldap:

try:     path = 'cn=people,ou=office,o=company'     l = ldap.open('hostname')     # set which protocol to use, if you do not like the default     l.protocol_version = ldap.VERSION2     l.simple_bind('cn=root,ou=office,o=company','password')     # search for surnames beginning with a     # available options for how deep a search you want:     # LDAP_SCOPE_BASE, LDAP_SCOPE_ONELEVEL,LDAP_SCOPE_SUBTREE,     a = l.search_s(path, ldap.SCOPE_SUBTREE, 'sn='+'a*')     # delete fred     l.delete_s('cn=fred,'+path)     # add barney     # note: objectclass depends on the LDAP server     user_info = {'uid':'barney123',                 'givenname':'Barney',                 'cn':'barney123',                 'sn':'Smith',                 'telephonenumber':'123-4567',                 'facsimiletelephonenumber':'987-6543',                 'objectclass':('Remote-Address','person', 'Top'),                 'physicaldeliveryofficename':'Services',                 'mail':'fred123@company.com',                 'title':'programmer',                 }     id = 'cn=barney,'+path     l.add_s(id, user_info.items( )) except ldap.LDAPError, error:     print 'problem with ldap:', error

Discussion

The ldap module wraps the open source Openldap C API. However, with ldap, your Python program can talk to various versions of LDAP servers, as long as they're standards compliant, not just to Openldap servers.

The recipe shows a script with a few example uses of the ldap module. For simplicity, all the functions the recipe calls from the library are the '_s' versions (e.g., search_s): this means the functions are synchronousthat is, they wait for a response or an error code and don't return control to your program until either an error or a response appears from the server. Asynchronous programming is less elementary than synchronous, although it can often offer far better performance and scalability.

LDAP is widely used to keep and coordinate network-accessible information, particularly in large and geographically distributed organizations. Essentially, LDAP lets you organize information, search for it, create new items, and delete existing items. The ldap module lets your Python program perform the search, creation, and deletion functions.

Recipe13.17.Accessing LDAP Servers