I am learning Rails(no experience in web development and MVC), and to improve my skills, wanted to implement an application where authentication is done in LDAP. I have been reading RAILS 4 IN ACTION by Ryan Bigg and RUBY ON RAILS TUTORIAL by Michael Hartl. Now in those tutorials, applications that are developed needs an authentication system. They build the authentication system from scratch. Since the username/passwords are saved in the database they generate a User model. My question is, if I save user data in LDAP(and do authentication via LDAP), do I need to generate a user model? The User model is also used for saving cookies(to remember user sessions). Does it mean that I should generate User model but only save session data? Any pointer would be appreciated.
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I'm in the same exact position as you were. It would be awesome if you could share what you've done to help a brother out. :PFadi– Fadi2018-03-07 19:55:07 +00:00Commented Mar 7, 2018 at 19:55
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1 Answer
You certainly do not need to create a model inheriting from ActiveRecord::Base class, but having some class to hold the user information is suitable - even if it is only for the duration of a run time. Or do you really only wanto to do the authentication and then forget about the user?
If you are interested in using LDAP with the de facto standard Rails gem for authentication - devise , take a look at this Wiki Page https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Authenticate-via-LDAP.
All you have to do, is just use custom authentification strategy.
require 'net/ldap'
require 'devise/strategies/authenticatable'
module Devise
module Strategies
class LdapAuthenticatable < Authenticatable
def authenticate!
if params[:user]
ldap = Net::LDAP.new
ldap.host = [YOUR LDAP HOSTNAME]
ldap.port = [YOUR LDAP HOSTNAME PORT]
ldap.auth email, password
if ldap.bind
user = User.find_or_create_by(email: email) #optional lookup
success!(user) # you do have to return some object
else
fail(:invalid_login)
end
end
end
def email
params[:user][:email]
end
def password
params[:user][:password]
end
end
end
end
Warden::Strategies.add(:ldap_authenticatable, Devise::Strategies::LdapAuthenticatable)
If you want to avoid using devise go for warden-ldap https://github.com/renewablefunding/warden-ldap.
