Question

I’m going to implement RESTful user authentication against an LDAP directory in my Rails app using net-ldap. I’ve already verified that this works, but where do you put this in a Rails app? Does that go in some kind of helper? In my UsersController?

Here’s an example of some authentication code:

require 'rubygems'
require 'net/ldap'

ldap = Net::LDAP.new
ldap.encryption :simple_tls
ldap.host = 'directory.company.com'
ldap.port = 636
ldap.auth 'uid=human,ou=people,o=mycompany', 'turboSecret'

if ldap.bind
  puts 'win!'
else
  puts 'fail :('
end

Answer 1

I put this in app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb.

sessions_controller.rb

class SessionsController < ApplicationController

  # Authenticate user against their LDAP directory
  # user and directory correspond to models in my app
  # password is a string
  # For complete source, see http://github.com/sidewaysmilk/auther
  def directory_login(user, password)

    directory = user.directory

    return nil if !directory

    directory.bind_dn['%s'] = user.login

    ldap = Net::LDAP.new
    ldap.host = directory.host
    ldap.port = directory.port
    ldap.encryption :simple_tls if directory.use_simple_tls?
    ldap.auth directory.bind_dn, password
    if ldap.bind
      return user 
    end
  end

end