LDAP through Ruby or Rails

Question

I've been attempting to hook a Rails application up to ActiveDirectory. I'll be synchronizing data about users between AD and a database, currently MySQL (but may turn into SQL Server or PostgreSQL).

I've checked out activedirectory-ruby, and it looks really buggy (for a 1.0 release!?). It wraps Net::LDAP, so I tried using that instead, but it's really close to the actual syntax of LDAP, and I enjoyed the abstraction of ActiveDirectory-Ruby because of its ActiveRecord-like syntax.

Is there an elegant ORM-type tool for a directory server? Better yet, if there were some kind of scaffolding tool for LDAP (CRUD for users, groups, organizational units, and so on). Then I could quickly integrate that with my existing authentication code though Authlogic, and keep all of the data synchronized.

Answer 1

Here is sample code I use with the net-ldap gem to verify user logins from the ActiveDirectory server at my work:

require 'net/ldap' # gem install net-ldap

def name_for_login( email, password )
  email = email[/\A\w+/].downcase  # Throw out the domain, if it was there
  email << "@mycompany.com"        # I only check people in my company
  ldap = Net::LDAP.new(
    host: 'ldap.mycompany.com',    # Thankfully this is a standard name
    auth: { method: :simple, email: email, password:password }
  )
  if ldap.bind
    # Yay, the login credentials were valid!
    # Get the user's full name and return it
    ldap.search(
      base:         "OU=Users,OU=Accounts,DC=mycompany,DC=com",
      filter:       Net::LDAP::Filter.eq( "mail", email ),
      attributes:   %w[ displayName ],
      return_result:true
    ).first.displayName.first
  end
end

The first.displayName.first code at the end looks a little goofy, and so might benefit from some explanation:

• Net::LDAP#search always returns an array of results, even if you end up matching only one entry. The first call to first finds the first (and presumably only) entry that matched the email address.

• The Net::LDAP::Entry returned by the search conveniently lets you access attributes via method name, so some_entry.displayName is the same as some_entry['displayName'].

• Every attribute in a Net::LDAP::Entry is always an array of values, even when only one value is present. Although it might be silly to have a user with multiple "displayName" values, LDAP's generic nature means that it's possible. The final first invocation turns the array-of-one-string into just the string for the user's full name.