Connections

Introduction

Once you've defined your configuration, you must then create a connection and insert your configuration into it:

use LdapRecord\Connection;

$connection = new Connection([
     'hosts'    => ['192.168.1.1'],
     'username' => 'cn=user,dc=local,dc=com',
     'password' => 'secret',
]);

Connecting

Once you have your connection, call connect() to bind to your LDAP server:

try {
    $connection->connect();

    echo "Successfully connected!";
} catch (\LdapRecord\Auth\BindException $e) {
    $error = $e->getDetailedError();

    echo $error->getErrorCode();
    echo $error->getErrorMessage();
    echo $error->getDiagnosticMessage();
}

Connecting Anonymously

If you'd like to connect/bind anonymously to your LDAP server, simply set your username and password configuration parameters to null:

use LdapRecord\Connection;

$connection = new Connection([
     'hosts'    => ['192.168.1.1'],
     'username' => null,
     'password' => null,
]);

$connection->connect();

Binding

Using the connection instance, you can execute a bind request to perform LDAP authentication to see if a username and password is valid.

$user = 'cn=user,dc=local,dc=com';
$password = 'secret';

if ($connection->auth()->attempt($user, $password))
{
    echo "Username and password are correct!";
}

Important: After calling the above, the user you have configured in your connection configuration will be rebound to your LDAP server. This is to ensure you can continue to execute LDAP operations underneath a working user during the same request.

If you would like to run all further LDAP operations underneath the authenticated user for the duration of the request, pass in true in the third parameter in the attempt() method:

$user = 'cn=user,dc=local,dc=com';
$password = 'secret';

if ($connection->auth()->attempt($user, $password, $stayBound = true))
{
    echo "Username and password are correct!";

    // Run further LDAP operations under this user.
}

Important: Binding as the user will not persist LDAP connectivity between requests. PHP is stateless - which means a new LDAP connection is created upon every request to your application. LdapRecord does not and will not store user credentials to persist connectivity.

Container

You must add your LDAP connections into the container if you would like to use LdapRecord models. Models pull the connection that they use from this container by their name.

Adding Connections

use LdapRecord\Container;
use LdapRecord\Connection;

$connection = new Connection(['...']);

$connection->connect();

Container::addConnection($connection);

If you do not call connect on your connection prior to adding it into the Container, it will be connected to automatically when you attempt to retrieve query results.

Each connection you add can have it's own name. This is required for connecting to multiple LDAP servers at one time. To set the name of a connection in the container, pass it into the second parameter:

Container::addConnection($connection, 'domain-b');

Without passing in a name, the name of the connection is set to default. Passing in multiple connections without providing a name will overwrite the previously added connection, so be sure to identify them differently if needed:

use LdapRecord\Container;
use LdapRecord\Connection;

$connectionAlpha = new Connection(['...']);
$connectionBravo = new Connection(['...']);

Container::addConnection($connectionAlpha);

// This will overwrite $connectionAlpha:
Container::addConnection($connectionBravo);

If you do not define a $connection property inside of your LdapRecord models, they will use your default connection.

Getting Connections

To get the default connection, call the getDefaultConnection method:

$connection = Container::getDefaultConnection();

To get a differently named connection, call the getConnection method:

$connection = Container::getConnection('domain-b');

Setting Default Connection

To set the name of the default connection, call the setDefaultConnection method prior to adding a connection:

Container::setDefaultConnection('domain-a');

Container::addConnection(new Connection(['...']));

// Returns the `domain-a` connection.
$connection = Container::getDefaultConnection();

Checking Connection Existence

To check if a connection exists, call the exists() method on the container instance:

if (Container::getInstance()->exists('domain-b')) {
    // The 'domain-b' connection exists!
}