So I was looking for a way to authenticate against LDAP with cake but I’ve found that it doesn’t support it by default. I found one that checks the auth against ldap then creates a local mysql account. This also didn’t use a actual ldap data sourc e either, it just handeled it’s own ldap connection. After I read through the standard cakphp auth component I saw that it wouldn’t be that hard to write an LDAP based auth component.

First you need to download this file ldap_auth.php to your ‘app/controllers/components/’ directory.

Then just like the original auth component you add that component to a model. I followed the usual auth example and created a model called Users.php like so

If some of these options are odd looking please have a look at my ldap data source post.

Next you are going to need your controller. Here is the one I used It defines the required functions like login, logout & authorize.

redirect($this->LdapAuth->logout());
	}

        function isAuthorized() {
                return true;
        }

}
?>

7

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I’ve been using CakePHP for a while now and I’ve been thinking for a while it was time to see if I could give something back. As an IT leader I’m in love with LDAP. It makes life so simple for me and my team. The big downside to LDAP is it’s not very easy to learn how all the objectClasses and attributes work with various applications. Microsoft has eliminated this with the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). It amazes me that no open source project has developed a tools such as this before. I’ve worked on a open source tool in the past that was a web interface wrapper around ldap to do account management, so I’m familiar with the requirements such an application should have. Being that CakePHP is so powerful, I wanted to see if I could do this with that.

When I first started, I realized that CakePHP didn’t have an LDAP data source officially supported yet. I did find two articles about some good attempts. One by euphrate, unfortunately this one was only for reading from ldap. The second one was by Gservat, this one was a bit more complete, but was not really working for me and as i read from his comments many others. I think we wrote his for CakePHP 1.1. Since I wanted to use Current cake 1.2.8xxx I set out to use this as my start and fix/extend it.

Before we get started I want to state the environment I was using to do my work was Redhat Enterprise 5.2 & Fedora 10 (Work requirement) with redhat directory server 8.1 and Fedora directory server 1.2. Now while LDAP is a standard protocol, some of the driver may have become centric to those platforms, so if this is the case, please leave me a comment and I will try to correct the ldap data source I’m working on. My hope is to get ldap as an offical CakePHP data source. With that said the reason i call this a living example is because I’ve continued to upgrade and improve this data source as well as this article. Some of the next features I want to implement is data associations. Basically has and belongs to many relations. This way when you look up an user account it also shows you all the groups that user is in. This will take some time but I’ll get there. This work is all being done in the hopes that I can use this data source and CakePHP to build a really user friendly web interface for managing enterprise LDAP infrastructures without a whole lot of LDAP knowledge.

6/1/2011 – This datasource has gotten picked up by the CakePHP core guys and they may be officially adding it in the future.  I’ve also added some changes to support Active Directory better.

4/15/2010 – Made several changes to the code to hopefully play nicely with active directory.  Tested it with CakePHP-1.3 everything looks good.  Please test and leave feedback.  The new datasource requires you to add a new field to the database.cfg ldap entry.  See the config below

8/20/2009 – New Home for the source. I’ve got this datasource in my github tree now http://github.com/analogrithems/idbroker/tree/master/models/datasources enjoy, and feel free to submit bugs or request there.

7/13/2009 – updated ldap_source.php to make better use of the debug describe code. Also fixed the way things update. Only update what has changed instead of whole record. This will help with LDAP aci rules when logging in as non-admin users and trying to do things like update your userpassword or email.

6/20/2009 – Updated ldap_source.php to work with OpenLDAP 2.3 schema system. First it will try ‘cn=schema’, if that doesn’t return any results then it looks for schemas in ‘cn=subschema’ this make sure the code will work with OpenLDAP as well as the Netscape based versions like iPlanet, Redhat Directory Server, Fedora Directory Server etc.

First things first, here is my ldap data source for CakePHP. You will need to download this ldap_source.php to your ‘app/models/datasources/’ directory.

So lets dive right in below is the database config we will use.

<?php
class DATABASE_CONFIG {
var $ldap = array (
 		'datasource' =--> 'ldap',
		'host' => 'localhost',
		'port' => 389,
		'basedn' => 'dc=examnple,dc=com',
		'login' => '',
		'password' => '',
		'database' => '',
                'tls'         => false,
                'type' => 'Netscape', //Available types are 'OpenLDAP', 'ActiveDirectory', 'Netscape'
		'version' => 3
	);
}
?>

You notice that the variables database, login and password are blank. Keep at least database this way. You can populate login and password if don’t want your ldap connections to be anonymous. I keep mine blank because I have written my own auth component that uses ldap, So once I’m authed that gets passed to the datasource instead. This is a ugly hack that I’ve written another post about.

Please note that if you are using Redhat directory server, iPlanet or Fedora Project 389 then the type is Netscape as these all evolved off the Netscape LDAP server code base.  The other available types are ‘OpenLDAP’ or ‘ActiveDirectory’  (case matters).

Here is our people model for accessing the users in your LDAP tree.

<?php
class Person extends AppModel {
        var $name = 'Person';
        var $useDbConfig = 'ldap';

        // This would be the ldap equivalent to a primary key if your dn is
        // in the format of uid=username, ou=people, dc=example, dc=com
        var $primaryKey = 'uid';

        // The table would be the branch of your basedn that you defined in
        // the database config
        var $useTable = '';

        var $validate = array(
                'cn' => array(
                        'alphaNumeric' => array(
                                'rule' => array('custom', '/^[a-zA-Z ]+$/'),
                                'required' => true,
                                'on' => 'create',
                                'message' => 'Only Letters, Numbers and spaces	 can be used for Display Name.'
                        ),
                        'between' => array(
                                'rule' => array('between', 5, 40),
                                'on' => 'create',
                                'message' => 'Between 5 to 40 characters'
                        )
                ),
                'sn' => array(
                                'rule' => array('custom', '/^[a-zA-Z]*$/'),
                                'required' => true,
                                'on' => 'create',
                                'message' => 'Only Letters and Numbers can be used for Last Name.'
                ),
                'userpassword' => array(
                                'rule' => array('minLength', '8'),
                                'message' => 'Mimimum 8 characters long.'
                ),
                'uid' => array(
                                'rule' => array('custom', '/^[a-zA-Z0-9]*$/'),
                                'required' => true,
                                'on' => 'create',
                                'message' => 'Only Letters and Numbers can be used for Username.'
                )
        );
}
?>

Here is a very basic controller to accompany our people model. It demonstrates the important core functions and should get you started on using this data source with your own application.

<?php
class PeopleController extends AppController {

	var $name = 'People';
	var $components = array('RequestHandler', 'Ldap');
	var $helpers = array('Form','Html','Javascript', 'Ajax');

	function add(){
		if(!empty($this->data)){
			$this->data['Person']['objectclass'] = array('top', 'organizationalperson', 'inetorgperson','person','posixaccount','shadowaccount');

			if($this->data['Person']['password'] == $this->data['Person']['password_confirm']){
				$this->data['Person']['userpassword'] = $this->data['Person']['password'];
				unset($this->data['Person']['password']);
				unset($this->data['Person']['password_confirm']);

				if(!isset($this->data['Person']['homedirectory'])&& isset($this->data['Person']['uid'])){
					$this->data['Person']['homedirectory'] = '/home/'.$this->data['Person']['uid'];
				}

				$cn = $this->data['Person']['cn'];
				if ($this->Person->save($this->data)) {
					$this->Session->setFlash($cn.' was added Successfully.');
					$id = $this->Person->id;
					$this->redirect(array('action' => 'view', 'id'=> $id));
				}else{
					$this->Session->setFlash("$cn couldn't be created.");
				}
			}else{
				$this->Session->setFlash("Passwords don't match.");
			}
		}
		$attributes = array('uidnumber', 'uid', 'homedirectory');
		$preset = $this->autoSet($attributes);
		foreach($this->data['Person'] as $key => $value){
			$preset[$key] = $value;
		}
		$this->data['Person'] = $preset;

		$groups = $this->Ldap->getGroups(array('cn','gidnumber'),null,'posixgroup');
		foreach($groups as $group){
			$groupList[$group['gidnumber']] = $group['cn'];
		}
		natcasesort($groupList);
		$this->set('groups',$groupList);
		$this->layout = 'people';
	}

	function view( $id ){
		if(!empty($id)){
			$filter = $this->Person->primaryKey."=".$id;
			$people = $this->Person->find('first', array( 'conditions'=>$filter));
			$this->set(compact('people'));
		}
		$this->layout = 'people';
	}

	function delete($id = null) {
		$this->Person->id = $id;
		return $this->Person->del($id);
	}

	/**
	*  The AuthComponent provides the needed functionality
	*  for login, so you can leave this function blank.
	*/
	function login() {
	}

	function logout() {
		$this->redirect($this->LdapAuth->logout());
	}

	//Very Ugly, fix this.,
	function isAuthorized() {
		return true;
	}

}

So lets talk about somethings here, in our model we define $primaryKey & $useTable variables. The $useTable is the branch of the ldap server. For this models purpose we define our table as ‘ou=people’. This makes sure that objects we create (I.E. Users/people) will be added under the organization unit people. It also makes sure that when you pass something like ‘jdoe’ to the delete action it will search that branch for the user object to delete. The $primaryKey also helps in the creation and deleting of users. It makes sure that the dn is created as uid, this is helpful to make sure that a user doesn’t already have that user name. Also since ldap is case insensitive you don’t have to worry about the possible variations of the object names when checking the existence.

Now your model isn’t limited to one branch or object type. If you wanted to create a browser for example your could define a model like the following.

You’ll notice here we set our $useTable to nothing (important, you get errors about no db defined from CakePHP if this missing). The really interesting part here is that we set $primaryKey to dn. This is the ultimate primary key for our type or data source. The difference here is that when we create/delete an object we have to pass it the full dn.

Our new data source also adds some new options to the find function.
$options['targetDN'] : This is more like the point in the tree we want to start our search. If you don’t define it it defaults to the $useTable.$config[$useDbConfig]['basedn'] if your $useTable variable is empty it defaults to the basedn configured in your database config.

$options['scope'] : If you’ve worked with ldap before then you are familiar with the concept of search scopes. You have three search scopes, ‘sub’, ‘one, & ‘base’. Basically sub means search from this point down the tree. one means search one level below this point and base means search just this point. For example if you wanted to see if a user already existed you could set the targetDn to uid=jdoe,ou=people,dc=example,dc=com and it will check if this object already exists. The default scope is sub

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