The ldap3 project

ldap3 is a strictly RFC 4510 conforming LDAP v3 pure Python client library. The whole ldap3 library has been written from scratch and the same codebase works with Python 2, Python 3, PyPy and PyPy3 on any system where it can gain access to the network via Python and its Standard Library.

License

The ldap3 library is open source software released under the LGPL v3 license (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html). This means that you can use the ldap3 library in any application (either open or proprietary). You can also copy, distribute and modify the ldap3 library provided that modifications are described and licensed for free under LGPL. Derivatives works of ldap3 can only be redistributed under LGPL, but applications that use the library don’t have to be.

RFCs Compliance

The ldap3 library strictly follows the latest (as of 2018) RFCs describing the LDAP v3 protocol:

  • The latest RFCs for LDAP v3 (RFCs 4510-4518, dated 2006) obsolete the previous RFCs specified in RFC3377 (2251-2256, 2829, 2830, 3371) for LDAP v3 and amend and clarify the LDAP protocol.

  • All the ASN1 definitions are written from scratch to be current with RFC 4511.

To avoid unnecessary server and network load caused by poorly formed searches The ldap3 library deliberately doesn’t follow the specification in RFC4511 (4.5.1.8.1) that states that in a Search operation “an empty list with no attributes requests the return of all user attributes.”. Attributes must be explicitly requested or the ldap3.ALL_ATTRIBUTES must be used in the Search operation.

The library allows to send an empty member list while creating a GroupOfNames object, even if this is not allowed in the official LDAP v3 schema.

ldap3 allows communication over Unix sockets (ldapi:// scheme, LDAP over IPC) even if this is not required by any official LDAP RFCs.

PEP8 Compliance

ldap3 is PEP8 compliant, except for line length. PEP8 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/) is the standard coding style guide for the Python Standard Library and for many other Python projects. It provides a consistent way of writing code for maintainability and readability following the principle that “software is more read than written”.

Home Page

The home page of the ldap3 project is https://github.com/cannatag/ldap3

Documentation

Documentation is available at http://ldap3.readthedocs.io. You can download a PDF copy of the manual at https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/ldap3/stable/ldap3.pdf

Download

The ldap3 package can be downloaded at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ldap3. If you use a package manager that support the wheel format you can get the universal wheel package, and install it on any supported Python environment.

Install

Install with pip install ldap3. If needed the library installs the pyasn1 package. If you need Kerberos support you must install the gssapi package. ldap3 includes a backport (from Python 3.4.3) of ssl.check_hostnames to use on older (< 2.7.10) Python version. If you want to use a newer version of the check_hostnames feature you can install the backports.ssl_check_hostnames package that should be kept updated by its author with the latest Python release.

GIT repository

You can download the latest released source code at https://github.com/cannatag/ldap3/tree/master

Contributing to this project

ldap3 source is hosted on github. You can contribute to the ldap3 project on https://github.com/cannatag/ldap3 forking the project and submitting a pull request with your modifications.

Continuous integration

Continuous integration for testing is at https://travis-ci.org/cannatag/ldap3

Support

You can submit support tickets on https://github.com/cannatag/ldap3/issues/new

Contact me

For information and suggestions you can contact me at cannatag@gmail.com. You can also open a support ticket on https://github.com/cannatag/ldap3/issues/new

Thanks to

  • Ilya Etingof, the author of the pyasn1 package for his excellent work and support.

  • Mark Lutz for his Learning Python and Programming Python excellent books series and John Goerzen and Brandon Rhodes for their books Foundations of Python Network Programming (Second and Third edition). These books are wonderful tools for learning Python and this project owes a lot to them.

  • JetBrains for donating to this project the Open Source license of PyCharm Professional.

  • GitHub for providing the free source repository space and tools used to develop this project.

  • The Python Software Foundation for supporting the cloud lab infrastructure used for testing the library.