What it is

Django-ldap-groups is a reusable application for the Django web framework. This project is unmaintained, please feel free to fork. I have not had a need to authenticate against LDAP for a few years now.

Current Version

Please use version 0.1.3, prior versions had incorrect setup.py files that would fail to install the template.

What it does

The django-ldap-groups app provides two pluggable authentication backends for Django that allow web app users to authenticate against an LDAP server, one backend for Active Directory and another for Novell eDirectory. I suspect the eDirectory backend will work with minimal modifications for most other LDAP servers.

In addition, the app provides a model that allows site administrators to map LDAP organizational units (OUs) to Django groups. These maps provide a way to assign a user authenticated via LDAP to particular Django groups in order to acquire the permissions set on these groups.

With the combination of the authentication backends, which both authenticate users and create them if they do not already exist in the Django database, and the LDAP OU mappings, django-ldap-groups provides a single application that gives site administrators the means to handle both authentication and authorization based on the structures already in place in LDAP.

Where it comes from

This app was inspired by a number of snippets on Django Snippets, though primarily on http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/901/ by "mary". Her AD authN backend was what I modified to what you see here. From there, I expanded to allow eDirectory to work with it, and added the LDAPGroup mapping and admin modifications.