Using CKAN with the Cosign SSO system and LDAP

Question

I'm using CKAN with Apache and an SSO system called Cosign. Cosign works as an authenticator in Apache and ends up setting REMOTE_USER before the python code fires up. What I'm trying to do is use LDAP user lookup based on that preset REMOTE_USER. Can I do that with the CKAN ldap plugin (http://extensions.ckan.org/extension/ldap/)? Any advice greatly appreciated - I'm a Python and CKAN novice.

Answer 1

The short answer is that ckanext-ldap doesn't do that. What it does is provide a custom login form (username and password) that authenticates the credentials via LDAP. It then creates a session for the corresponding CKAN user, creating a user account first if required. Having it do anything else would require customisation of the extension although there are a number of options documented in its readme that alter the behaviour in small ways.

Whether ckanext-ldap would be a suitable extension to build upon to achieve what you want depends on what you want to do, which isn't clear from your question.