ldap2json

A simple proxy that turns HTTP GET requests into LDAP queries and then returns JSON-encoded results.

Requirements

ldap2json requires the bottle framework, the ldap module, the configobj module, the memcache module, and a recent version of Python (where "recent" means "has argparse").

Running ldap2json

Running ldap2json from the command line:

./ldap2json.py [ -f configfile ]

Return values

If a search returns an empty result, ldap2json will return a 404 status code to the caller.

Otherwise, the return value is a list of [DN, attribute_dictionary] tuples, where DN is the distinguished name of the record and attribute_dictionary is a key/value dictionary of attributes. The values of the attribute dictionary will always be lists, even if attributes are single-valued.

Configuration

ldap2json uses a simple INI-style configuration file.

Global settings

The global section of the config file may contain values for the following:

• host -- Bind address for the web application.
• port -- Port on which to listen.
• debug -- Enable some debugging output if true. This will also cause bottle to reload the server if the source files change.

ldap

The ldap section may contain two values:

• uris -- a common-separated list of ldap:// URIs specifying the endpoint for queries. If a server is unavailable, ldap2json will try the next one in sequence until it is able to connect.
• basedn -- the base DN to use for searches.

An example ldap section might look like this:

[ldap]

uris = ldap://ldap1.example.com, ldap://ldap2.example.com
basedn = "ou=people, dc=example, dc=com"

Note that due to my use of the configobj module, strings containing commas must be quoted if you do not want them converted into a list.

memcache

ldap2json will use memcache, if it's available, for caching results. The memcache section may contain values for the following:

• servers -- a comma-separated list of memcache host:port servers.
• lifetime -- the lifetime of items added to the cache.

An example memcache section might look like this:

[memcache]

servers = 127.0.0.1:11211
lifetime = 600

An example

Assuming that the server is running on localhost port 8080, the following:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/ldap?cn=alice*

Might return something like this:

[
  [
    "uid=alice,ou=people,o=Example Organization,c=US",
    {
      "telephoneNumber": [
        "+1-617-555-1212"
      ],
      "description": [
        "employee"
      ],
      "title": [
        "Ninja"
      ],
      "sn": [
        "Person"
      ],
      "mail": [
        "alice@example.com"
      ],
      "givenName": [
        "Alice"
      ],
      "cn": [
        "Alice Person"
      ]
    }
  ]
]