Using LDAP authentication with RStudio Workbench

***This article is no longer being maintained, please refer to the following sections of the admin guide***

https://docs.posit.co/ide/server-pro/authenticating_users/pam_authentication.html and https://docs.posit.co/ide/server-pro/access_and_security/pam_sessions.html and https://docs.posit.co/ide/server-pro/authenticating_users/active_directory.html

RStudio Workbench connects to LDAP via PAM. If you already have LDAP set up for the server you're running RStudio Workbench on, you'll need to integrate it with PAM. If you've already done that with other utilities on the server, such as ssh or general logins, you may be able to copy that PAM profile to use with RStudio:

sudo cp /etc/pam.d/login /etc/pam.d/rstudio

Otherwise, you'll need to configure the rstudio PAM profile in order to make sure it uses LDAP for their authentication. There are a few ways to do this; one way is install the pam_ldap.so plugin and calling it in the profile. Here's a very basic setup we've used in the past:

/etc/pam.d/rstudio:

auth       sufficient     pam_ldap.so
account    required       pam_ldap.so
session    requisite      pam_ldap.so

If you need to use PAM sessions, you may need to call the pam_ldap plugin there as well.

For testing, we'd recommend using the pamtester utility described in the Admin Guide here:http://docs.rstudio.com/ide/server-pro/authenticating-users.html#diagnosing-pam-authentication-problems

We'd really recommend reading through the PAM guides linked in the admin guide - LDAP and PAM are very powerful but may require quite a bit of specific configuration that we may not be able to provide.