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vsc_ldap

Purpose

LDAP is a hirarchical data structure which allows to specify to which categories/groups does a member belong to. This is very useful e.g. in institutions, schools, universities, companies etc where a member of the firm is part of one or more units. At KULeuven VSC we use LDAP to organize/manage the users.

Python-LDAP

This Python module provides basic Python facilities to talk to the local LDAP and query the users information. We use the Python-LDAP (https://www.python-ldap.org/) connector API under the hood.

Example

As a demonstration, to retireve the list of all KULeuven users, we do the following

# Get all active users
vsc = 'vsc'
search_string = '(&(status=active) (institute=leuven))'

with ldap_lib.ldap_conn(vsc) as lc:
  res = lc.search(search_string)
  n_users = len(res)

  # Get all available records of a specific field
  vsc_numbers = lc.get_field('uid')
  login = lc.get_field('instituteLogin')

  # Get a specific user info
  myself = lc.get_user_info('vsc30745')

Another example is to retrieve the information for a specific user from the KULeuven LDAP, knowing the user's name

kuleuven = 'kuleuven'
search_string = '(uid=u0012345)'
with ldap_lib.ldap_conn(kuleuven) as lc:
  res = lc.search(search_string)
  dic = res[0][1]
  for key, val in dic.iteritems(): print key, val

Specifying Connection Target

An instance of ldap_lib.ldap_conn() requires specifying the target. The target attribute will determine to which LDAP to connect to; therefore, the following three options are available:

  • target="vsc" to query the VSC LDAP and retrieve the users information
  • target="kuleuven" to query the public KULeuven LDAP (u-, r- and s-accounts)
  • target="kuleuven_private" to query the private KULeuven LDAP (which includes the above accounts, together with the b-accounts for external users)

Dependencies