Django user authentication: django_auth_ldap.backend.LDAPBackend

Question

I don't understand how to use the LDAPBackend in django, all I want to do is to authenticate a user against LDAP. I have tried the following:

from django_auth_ldap.backend import LDAPBackend
auth = LDAPBackend()
user = auth.authenticate(username='my_uid',password='pwd')

At this point user is None and looking at tcpdump I can't see any connection attempt to the LDAP server.

settings.py

AUTH_LDAP_SERVER_URI = 'ldap.example.com'
AUTH_LDAP_USER_DN_TEMPLATE = 'uid=%(user)s,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com'
AUTH_LDAP_BIND_AS_AUTHENTICATING_USER = True
AUTH_LDAP_CACHE_GROUPS = True
AUTH_LDAP_GROUP_CACHE_TIMEOUT = 3600
AUTH_LDAP_USER_ATTR_MAP = {
"first_name": "givenName",
"last_name": "sn",
"email": "mail"
}
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = (
'django.contrib.auth.backends.ModelBackend',
'django_auth_ldap.backend.LDAPBackend',
)

The official django doc doesn't provide any snippet about how to use this backend in a view.

Many thanks for your help!

Answer 1

All of the documentation for django-auth-ldap is here. For debugging your configuration, you'll want to install a logging handler on the 'django_auth_ldap' logger; see Django's logging documentation for more on that.

At a glance, I would say that one problem is that AUTH_LDAP_SERVER_URI is not set to a URI; try something of the form ldap://ldap.example.com/. You'll also want to review the documentation for AUTH_LDAP_BIND_AS_AUTHENTICATING_USER: this is an advanced and somewhat subtle option that you should only enable if you know that you need it.