web2ldap - Installing

A brief description on how to install it
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Run modes

web2ldap is designed to be very flexible. It can be installed in two different modes running persistent as a multi-threaded server process under Win32 and Unix platforms:

stand-alone
You can start web2ldap as stand-alone web server running on a specific address (default is fully-qualified hostname) and port (default 1760). You can serve some other static web content in that mode (e.g. the .css files).
FastCGI
If you are running a web server with support for FastCGI you might want to consider running web2ldap as multi-threaded FastCGIServer.
SCGI
If you are running Apache web server with support for SCGI you might want to consider running web2ldap as SCGIServer.

Prerequisites

For running web2ldap 0.11.0+ you need:

Python (mandatory)
Python 2.0 or later (current supported and tested version is Python 2.2) built with thread support (configure --with-threads).
PyWebLib (mandatory)
Module package for web application programming.
python-ldap (mandatory)
You have to grab a recent pre-release 2.0.0pre06+ and build it against OpenLDAP 2.0.13+ libs.
PyDNS (optional)
If you want to make use of SRV RR's to automatically locate your LDAP server for a given dc-style DN you have to install this DNS module.
md4.py (optional)
This is needed if you want to set Samba NT passwords.

Web server

Additional web server software depends on the running mode:
Running mode Web server Additional software needed SSL support
stand-alone Python standard lib - currently not supported
FastCGI server Apache mod_fastcgi and Python module fcgi.py. Apache SSL or Apache with mod_ssl
FastCGI server
(ISAPI/NSAPI)
Netscape/AOL, Sun/iPlanet or MS IIS FastCGI for ISAPI/NSAPI and Python module fcgi.py. built-in
SCGI server Apache mod_scgi including the Python module Apache SSL or Apache with mod_ssl

Pre-compiled packages

There are some ready-to-use packages of the required software and web2ldap. Note that the Prerequisites have changed since web2ldap 0.11.x!

See python-ldap's download page for a comprehensive list of pre-compiled python-ldap packages.

Linux-Distributions

S.u.S.E.
Already has packages of OpenLDAP 2, Apache with mod_ssl and mod_fastcgi.
Red Hat
Various useful RPM packages for Red Hat 7.2
Debian
Potato includes various packages of Python, OpenLDAP and python-ldap for Python as well as ApacheSSL and Apache with mod_ssl.

FreeBSD

Oddbjorn Steffensen <oddbjorn@oddbjorn.bdc.no> maintains a FreeBSD port which you can directly retrieve via CVS from the FreeBSD archive.

Win32

There are currently no OpenLDAP 2 libs for Win32 available. Therefore python-ldap is currently not available on Win32.

Installing

Unix platform

  1. Install all required software on your system.
  2. Extract content of archive web2ldap-*.tar.gz to e.g. /usr/local. Regarding directory names under several Unix flavours: Your mileage may vary.
  3. Rename /usr/local/web2ldap-<version> to /usr/local/web2ldap.
  4. Choose the right script web2ldap.py for your running mode and adjust the path to the Python interpreter executable in the first line of the web2ldap.py script (see also python -h for usage of option -O and -OO for running with optimized bytecode generation).
    stand-alone
    [web2ldapdir]/sbin/web2ldap.py.
    Apache with mod_fastcgi
    [web2ldapdir]/fcgi/web2ldap.py should reside in a directory which has the right mod_fastcgi directives set for running it as a static FastCGI server.
    Assuming you extracted web2ldap to /usr/local/web2ldap you can configure it as FastCGI server with the following mod_fastcgi directives:
    Alias /web2ldap-fcgi/ "/usr/local/web2ldap/fcgi/"
    <Directory /usr/local/web2ldap/fcgi>
    AddHandler fastcgi-script .py
    </Directory>
    	
    The URL for accessing this web2ldap FastCGI server would be

    http://hostname/web2ldap-fcgi/web2ldap.py

  5. Edit configuration modules under [web2ldapdir]/etc/web2ldap/web2ldapcnf/ which contain comments about every configuration parameter. See also the documentation.
  6. Change current directory to the directory where you extracted web2ldap and invoke python [web2ldapdir]/sbin/compile.py or python -O [web2ldapdir]/sbin/compile.py for compiling all Python sources.
  7. For a quick start as stand-alone web gateway simply invoke the script [web2ldapdir]/sbin/web2ldap.py which outputs the start URL before detaching from console.

Win32 platform (stand-alone mode)

Windows users like it simple. ;-)

  1. Install all required software on your system.
  2. Unpack .tar.gz archive with e.g. recent version of Winzip.
  3. Double-click on [web2ldapdir]\sbin\web2ldap.py for starting web2ldap in stand-alone mode.

Page last modified: Saturday, 28-Sep-2002 19:56:03 CEST, sponsored by stroeder.com