godap

A minimalistic LDAP server in Go

What is this thing?

This is the beginnings of LDAP serving functionality written in Go. It is not intended to be or become a full LDAP server, it's just minimal bind and simplistic search functionality. It aims to be enough to implement authentication-related LDAP services for use with Apache httpd or anything else that supports LDAP auth.

Theoretically more could be built out to approach the functionality of a full LDAP server. I don't have time for that stuff.

Why was this made?

Because the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The short version of the story goes like this: I hate LDAP. I used to love it. But I loved it for all the wrong reasons. LDAP is supported as an authentication solution by many different pieces of software. Aside from its de jure standard status, its wide deployment cements it as a de facto standard as well.

However, just because it is a standard doesn't mean it is a great idea.

I'll admit that given its age LDAP has had a good run. I'm sure its authors carefully considered how to construct the protocol and chose ASN.1 and its encoding with all of wellest of well meaning intentions.

The trouble is that with today's Internet, LDAP is just a pain in the ass. You can't call it from your browser. It's not human readable or easy to debug. Tooling is often arcane and confusing. It's way more complicated than what is needed for most simple authentication-only uses. (Yes, I know there are many other uses than authentication - but it's often too complicated for those too.)

Likely owing to the complexity of the protocol, there seems to be virtually no easy to use library to implement the server side of the LDAP protocol that isn't tied in with some complete directory server system; and certainly not in a language as easy to "make it work" as Go.

So this means that if you are a web developer and you have a database table with usernames and (hopefully properly salted and hashed) passwords in it, and you have a third party application that supports LDAP authentication, you can't easily use your own user data source and just make it "speak LDAP" to this other application.

Well, this project provides the basic guts to make that work. Have a look at the test file for an example of what to do.

In a way, with this project I embrace LDAP. In the sense that a wrestler embraces the neck of his opponent to form a headlock, and the unruly brute is muscled into submission.

Dependencies

ASN.1+BER encoding and decoding is done with this: https://github.com/go-asn1-ber/asn1-ber

It works, it's cool.

Disclaimers

1. This thing is still fairly rough. Haven't had time to polish it. But I wanted to get it up on Github in case anyone else was interested. I've been searching for something like this off and on for a while, finally got around to writing it.

2. It's not impossible that in some places I'm violating pieces of the LDAP spec. My goal with this project was to get it so LDAP can be useful as an authentication mechanism on top of other non-directory data sources. It does that, I'm happy. Pull requests welcome to fix things that aren't perfect. License is MIT so feel free to do whatever you want with the code.