Uffd

This is the UserFerwaltungsFrontend. A web service to manage LDAP users, groups and permissions.

Development chat: #uffd-development

Dependencies

Please note that we refer to Debian packages here and not pip packages.

• python3
• python3-ldap3
• python3-flask
• python3-flask-sqlalchemy
• python3-flask-migrate
• python3-qrcode
• python3-fido2 (version 0.5.0, optional)
• python3-oauthlib
• python3-flask-babel

Some of the dependencies (especially fido2 and flask-oauthlib) changed their API in recent versions, so make sure to install the versions from Debian Buster. For development, you can also use virtualenv with the supplied requirements.txt.

Development

Before running uffd, you need to create the database with flask db upgrade. The database is placed in instance/uffd.sqlit3.

Then use flask run to start the application:

FLASK_APP=uffd flask db upgrade
FLASK_APP=uffd FLASK_ENV=development flask run

During development, you may want to enable LDAP mocking, as you otherwise need to have access to an actual LDAP server with the required schema. You can do so by setting LDAP_SERVICE_MOCK=True in the config. Afterwards you can login as a normal user with "testuser" and "userpassword", or as an admin with "testadmin" and "adminpassword". Please note that the mocked LDAP functionality is very limited and many uffd features do not work correctly without a real LDAP server.

Deployment

You should absolutely never use pip install uffd for production deployments. The dependencies of the pip package roughly represent the versions shipped by Debian stable. We do not keep them updated and we do not test the pip package! The pip package only exists for local testing/development and to help build the Debian package.

To deploy to production, use our Debian package. You will get security updates for all dependencies from Debian. The Debian package uses uwsgi to run uffd and ships an uffd-admin to execute flask commands in the correct context. If you upgrade, make sure to run flask db upgrade after every update! The Debian package takes care of this by itself using uwsgi pre start hooks. For an example uwsgi config, see our uswgi.ini. You might find our nginx include file helpful to setup a web server in front of uwsgi.

Python Coding Style Conventions

PEP 8 without double new lines, tabs instead of spaces and a max line length of 160 characters. We ship a pylint config to verify changes with.

Configuration

Uffd reads its default config from uffd/default_config.cfg. You can overwrite config variables by creating a config file in the instance folder. The file must be named config.cfg (Python syntax), config.json or config.yml/config.yaml. You can also set a custom file name with the environment variable CONFIG_FILENAME.

Bind with LDAP service account or as user?

Uffd can use a dedicated service account for LDAP operations by setting LDAP_SERVICE_BIND_DN. Leave that variable blank to use anonymous bind. Or set LDAP_SERVICE_USER_BIND to use the credentials of the currently logged in user.

If you choose to run with user credentials, some features are not available, like password resets or self signup, since in both cases, no user credentials can exist.

OAuth2 Single-Sign-On Provider

Other services can use uffd as an OAuth2.0-based authentication provider. The required credentials (client_id, client_secret and redirect_uris) for these services are defined in the config. The services need to be setup to use the following URLs with the Authorization Code Flow:

• /oauth2/authorize: authorization endpoint
• /oauth2/token: token request endpoint
• /oauth2/userinfo: endpoint that provides information about the current user

The userinfo endpoint returns json data with the following structure:

{
  "id": 10000,
  "name": "Test User",
  "nickname": "testuser"
  "email": "testuser@example.com",
  "ldap_dn": "uid=testuser,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com",
  "groups": [
    "uffd_access",
    "users"
  ],
}

id is the uidNumber, name the display name (cn) and nickname the uid of the user's LDAP object.

Translation

The web frontend is initially written in English and translated in the following Languages:

The selection uses the language browser header by default but can be overwritten via a UI element. You can specify the available languages in the config.

Use the update_translations.sh to update the translation files.

License

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, see LICENSE.