Cool Solution - Connect Apache to the LDAP

Version 3.2

Note: Cool Solutions are articles documenting additional functionality based on Univention products. Not all of the shown steps in the article are covered by Univention Support. For questions about your support coverage contact your contact person at Univention before you want to implement one of the shown steps.

Also regard the legal notes at Terms of Service.

It sometimes is desired to protect a websites with a personal authentication. The Apache webserver can use the LDAP directory provided by Univention Corporate Server (UCS) for authentication. This article describes the requirements and necessary steps to allow the Apache webserver in UCS to use the OpenLDAP directory server for user authentication.

Requirements

The requirements are installed by default. Enable the following Apacha-Mods with:

a2enmod ldap
a2enmod authnz_ldap

Afterwards a restart of Apache has to be executed.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Configuration

Use the UCS management system and create a user with only the simple authentication account option selected. The user is needed for the connection to the LDAP Server. Afterwards, the users DN (distinguised name) and it's password are needed. Ensure that the password is reasonable complex. To find the DN you can use the following command on the command line

univention-directory-manager users/user list --filter uid="<username>" | grep DN:

Within the folder you wish to protect create the following

.htaccess

file within your web page.

It needs to contain the following content

AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthType Basic
AuthName "<my name>"
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off
AuthLDAPURL ldap://<ucs dc>:7389/<LDAP base>?uid
AuthLDAPBindDN <dn of the user>
AuthLDAPBindPassword <users password>
require valid-user

After restarting Apache again

/etc/inti.d/apache2 restart

you are required to enter a login to access the webpage.