README.md

= Active Directory

Ruby Integration with Microsoft's Active Directory system based on original code by Justin Mecham and James Hunt at http://rubyforge.org/projects/activedirectory

See documentation on ActiveDirectory::Base for more information.

Caching: Queries for membership and group membership are based on the distinguished name of objects. Doing a lot of queries, especially for a Rails app, is a sizable slowdown. To alleviate the problem, I've implemented a very basic cache for queries which search by :distinguishedname. This is disabled by default. All other queries are unaffected.

A code example is worth a thousand words:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_directory'

# Uses the same settings as net/ldap
settings = {
	:host => 'domain-controller.example.local',
	:base => 'dc=example,dc=local',
	:port => 636,
	:encryption => :simple_tls,
	:auth => {
	  :method => :simple,
	  :username => "username",
	  :password => "password"
	}
}

# Basic usage
ActiveDirectory::Base.setup(settings)

ActiveDirectory::User.find(:all)
ActiveDirectory::User.find(:first, :userprincipalname => "[email protected]")

ActiveDirectory::Group.find(:all)

#Caching is disabled by default, to enable:
ActiveDirectory::Base.enable_cache
ActiveDirectory::Base.disable_cache
ActiveDirectory::Base.cache?

#Changing Base Location 
# Narrows search to new base OU and lowers lookups on large Active Directory databases 
ActiveDirectory::Base.base = "CN=Users,dc=example,dc=local'
ActiveDirectory::User.find(:all)
 
#Changing base to sub OU
ActiveDirectory::Base.base = "OU=Head Office,OU=Security Groups,dc=example,dc=local"
ActiveDirectory::Group.find(:all)