I am new to Django and have been assigned the task of implementing a user authentication system with LDAP as the backend. I guess the documentation assumes that the end developer has enough experience in Django to be able to understand and implement such a system. This is where I fail to understand how to implement a simple django application with LDAP based authentication. Here is what I have understood so far:
Only posting the changes to a file:
settings.py
....
import ldap
from django_auth_ldap.config import LDAPSearch
AUTH_LDAP_SERVER_URI = "ldap://<my url>"
AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS = ('django_auth_ldap.backend.LDAPBackend')
AUTH_LDAP_CONNECTION_OPTIONS = {
ldap.OPT_REFERRALS: 0
}
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
....
'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
...
)
INSTALLED_APPS = (
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
....
)
auth.html
<html>
<head>
<title>Login</title>
</head>
<body>
{{state}}
<form action="" method="post"> {% csrf_token %}
Email address: <input type="text" name="email" value="{{ email }}" />
Password: <input type="password" name="password" value="" />
<input type="submit" value="Log in" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
models.py:
??
views.py:
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.contrib.auth import authenticate, login
from django.template import RequestContext
def login_user(request):
username = password = ""
state = ""
if request.POST:
username = request.POST.get('username')
password = request.POST.get('password')
print username, password
user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)
if user is not None:
login(request, user)
state = "Valid account"
else:
state = "Inactive account"
return render_to_response('auth_user/auth.html', RequestContext(request, {'state': state, 'username': username}))
What I am not able to understand?
1> I am pretty sure I would have to implement a function in views.py to get the POST values for email and password and validate it, e.g: [SO]. The documentation specifies to either implement a Search/Bind or Direct Bind. Why? If the views.py would contain the actual piece of authentication code, what is the code doing specified in the documentation?
2> If the views.py would perform the actual auth, then why do we need the variable specified in the documentation?
3> The author has done a great job with the library, but the documentation does not provide with a simple barebones example of how to implement the entire authentication system with LDAP. Can anyone please point to such a resource, if it exists? It is not easy to understand the files that need to be added/modified to implement such a system.