# ActiveLdap and windows **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [March 10, 2006, 8:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641 "2006-03-10T20:53:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jsmails)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 8:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641/1 "2006-03-10T20:53:33Z")
I thought I might try to create a Rails app to use LDAP authentication. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get the Ruby/LDAP stuff working in my environment (I’m using a windows server). If anyone out there has experience with this, could you dumb it down a little bit for me? ---
**Author:** ![jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jsmails)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2006, 11:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641/2 "2006-03-10T23:54:47Z")
ActiveLdap requires the ruby-ldap library, which, since it uses the C API, must be compiled. This could be tricky on a Windows machine. Supposedly some people have done it using Cygwin, but there’s little or no information out there about how. In our organization, we decided not to mess with it on Windows machines. We created an ActionWebService to do the LDAP authentication on our Linux server and then it can be accessed from any platform. This has the additional advantage of keeping all our auth code (configuration, business logic) in one place and lets us do cross-server, cross-framework (to support legacy PHP code) single sign-in with browser fingerprinting to reduce spoofing. If you get ruby-ldap to work on Windows, I’m sure the community would appreciate a step-by-step HOWTO. jacob smails wrote: > I thought I might try to create a Rails app to use LDAP authentication. > Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get the Ruby/LDAP stuff working > in my environment (I’m using a windows server). If anyone out there has > experience with this, could you dumb it down a little bit for me? ---
**Author:** ![jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jsmails)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2006, 5:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641/3 "2006-03-11T17:39:56Z")
I’m also looking for a way to get LDAP to work on windows. I have no option in this case to run on anything other than Windows so any help would be greatly appreciated. ---
**Author:** ![jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jsmails)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2006, 5:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641/4 "2006-03-13T17:05:24Z")
I’ve been thinking about doing something similar as a last resort. I will be running with IIS and I suppose that it is easy to integrate IIS with Active Directory. I’ll try and wrap up the ldap / active directory stuff in IIS as a web service and then use it from there. But it would be so much nicer to have it all in ruby. I saw that the ruby library is supposed to be working on windows now but I can’t figure out how to build it. So if anyone has been succesfull with it please let us others know. ---
**Author:** ![jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jsmails)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2006, 4:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641/5 "2006-03-13T16:32:45Z")
Jens Norrgrann wrote: > I’m also looking for a way to get LDAP to work on windows. I have no > option > in this case to run on anything other than Windows so any help would be > greatly appreciated. I know that using LDAP with PHP is pretty easy in a Windows environment. I think I may follow Jason’s example and set up a web service for LDAP authentication using php, and then access that from my RAILS app, using differnt ports on the same machine. Or, I may just bag the RAILS part altogether and do the whole thing in PHP. I guess one advantage to the web service would be that it could be used for multiple apps. ---
**Author:** ![jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@jsmails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jsmails)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2006, 5:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/activeldap-and-windows/54641/6 "2006-03-13T17:51:22Z")
Has anyone tried contacting the project owner? If you _have_ to use Windows, it sure would be nice to have it all in Ruby. I hate to see PHP introduced into the mix.