LDAP Authentication With Devise

I have been meaning to give Devise a try for quite a while. This weekend I was finally able to try it out. One of my requirements was to be able to authenticate against an LDAP server. There was a module already written to do this for Devise, but it was only for Rails 2.3.8 and I wanted to start new projects in Rails 3, so I set out to fork the project and re-write it as a Rails 3 gem.

Since this was my first experience with Devise, to write a gem, I spent a lot of time in the ruby debugger going line by line in Devise and Warden to see how things worked and why things were breaking, which usually turned out with me making a stupid mistake.

Eventually I was able to finish up, luckily I had already went through the process of creating a gem with a generator, so I was able to add some basic generators to make the setup process easier.

I made a quick screencast on how to setup a new Rails 3 application and use LDAP authentication:

There's still a lot to do, including locking, registrations, password changes, testing, making a single sign-on solution, and a lot more. Hopefully this is enough to get people up and running for now, though.

You can find it on the rails3 branch on github at: