LDAP

You can configure SonarQube authentication and authorization to an LDAP server (including the LDAP service of Active Directory) by configuring the correct values in <sonarqubeHome>/conf/sonar.properties.

The main features are:

• Password checking against the external authentication engine.
• Automatic synchronization of usernames and emails.
• Automatic synchronization of relationships between users and groups (authorization).
• Ability to authenticate against both the external and the internal authentication systems. There is an automatic fallback to the SonarQube internal system if the LDAP server is down.
• During the first successful authentication, the user account is created in the SonarQube database. Each time a user logs into SonarQube, the username and the email are synchronized. 
• Group synchronization is an option that will sync SonarQube group memberships with the LDAP service.

	Apache DS	OpenLDAP	Open DS	Active Directory
Anonymous
Simple
LDAPS
DIGEST-MD5
CRAM-MD5
GSSAPI

= successfully tested

Setup

1. Configure LDAP by editing <sonarqubeHome>/conf/sonar.properties (see table below).
2. Restart the SonarQube server and check the log file for:
   INFO org.sonar.INFO Security realm: LDAP ...
INFO o.s.p.l.LdapContextFactory Test LDAP connection: OK
3. Log in to SonarQube.
4. On log out users will be presented with a login page (/sessions/login), where they can choose to log in as a technical user or a domain user by passing the appropriate credentials.

For SonarScanners, we recommend using local technical users for authentication against SonarQube Server.

General Configuration

User Mapping

Group synchronization

Only groups and static groups are supported. Roles and dynamic groups are not supported; this page about Static Vs Dynamic LDAP Group management offers more detail about the differences.

To delege authorization, groups must first be defined in SonarQube. See the Group synchronization section on the Overview page for more details. After your groups are created, the following properties must be defined to allow SonarQube to automatically synchronize the relationships between users and groups.

Configuration sample

# LDAP configuration
# General Configuration
sonar.security.realm=LDAP
ldap.url=ldap://myserver.mycompany.com
ldap.bindDn=my_bind_dn
ldap.bindPassword=my_bind_password
  
# User Configuration
ldap.user.baseDn=ou=Users,dc=mycompany,dc=com
ldap.user.request=(&(objectClass=inetOrgPerson)(uid={login}))
ldap.user.realNameAttribute=cn
ldap.user.emailAttribute=mail
 
# Group Configuration
ldap.group.baseDn=ou=Groups,dc=sonarsource,dc=com
ldap.group.request=(&(objectClass=posixGroup)(memberUid={uid}))

Advanced LDAP Topics

Authentication Methods

• Anonymous - Used when only read-only access to non-protected entries and attributes is needed when binding to the LDAP server.
• Simple Simple authentication is not recommended for production deployments not using the LDAP secure protocol since it sends a cleartext password over the network.
• CRAM-MD5 - The Challenge-Response Authentication Method (CRAM), based on the HMAC-MD5 MAC algorithm (RFC 2195).
• DIGEST-MD5 - This is an improvement on the CRAM-MD5 authentication method (RFC 2831).
• GSSAPI - GSS-API is Generic Security Service API (RFC 2744). One of the most popular security services available for GSS-API is the Kerberos v5, used in Microsoft's Windows 2000 platform.

For a full discussion of LDAP authentication approaches, see RFC 2829 and RFC 2251.

Multiple Servers

To configure multiple servers:

# List the different servers
ldap.servers=server1,server2
  
# Configure server1
ldap.server1.url=ldap://server1:1389
ldap.server1.user.baseDn=dc=dept1,dc=com
...
 
# Configure server2
ldap.server2.url=ldap://server2:1389
ldap.server2.user.baseDn=dc=dept2,dc=com
...

Authentication will be tried on each server, in the order they are listed in the configurations until one succeeds.

Note that all the LDAP servers must be available while (re)starting the SonarQube server.

Migrate users to a new authentication method

If you are changing your delegated authentication method and migrating existing users from your previous authentication method, you can use the api/users/update_identity_provider web API to update your users' identity provider.

About user and identity provider IDs

To avoid the risk of misidentification, the following identification methods are used on all LDAP setups, including SonarQube instances with a single LDAP connection: 

• The local login of a new account is made unique with a suffix to the identifier. eg. login_<additional_id>.
• The name of the External Identity Provider is also made unique with the addition of the server key provided in the configuration. eg. LDAP_<server_key> where ldap.servers=<server_key>,...

Troubleshooting

• Detailed connection logs (and potential error codes received from the LDAP server) are output to SonarQube's <sonarqubeHome>/logs/web.log, when logging is in DEBUG mode.
• If you experience time outs when running SonarQube analysis using LDAP, Java parameters are documented here. Such parameters can be set in sonar.web.javaAdditionalOpts in <sonarqubeHome>/conf/sonar.properties.