Can I connect Confluence to LDAP and still create non-LDAP users?

[Nick Reilingh]

Consider the following – my organization's users have a centralized LDAP server for common authentication, but we would like to allow provisional access to Confluence for certain outside individuals (contractors, clients) who will not have LDAP accounts. It is also the case that only a small number of LDAP users (compared to the entire directory) should have access to Confluence.

Is this routine and relatively easy? Or will this require something like Crowd as an intermediary? You can kind of consider that our workgroup of confluence users is a sub-organization – we will make use of the LDAP server if possible, but not have any control over it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You can have more than one "user directory" in Confluence.  For this case, the simple approach is to have 2 - the internal directory and your LDAP one.  Then you can create non-LDAP users in the internal directory and LDAP users in LDAP and you'll see both sets in Confluence.

The one important trick here - avoid using the same login ids and groups, because Confluence will only read for the first instance.

If, for example, you have an LDAP login for "penguin" and he's in the group "fish eaters" in LDAP, then you add "penguin" to the internal directory and only add it to group "has feathers", you will only ever see the penguin account from the first directory.  If LDAP is first, it will stop reading there and never see "penguin" in group "has feathers"

[Nick Reilingh]

Ah, marvelous! I forgot about ldap groups -- I should just be able to use internal confluence groups for everybody, right? That is, mixing ldap users and "local" users in the same group as long as I don't dupe IDs?

[Jonathan Simonoff]

You can easily create local user accounts, whether or not you are using LDAP.  You can just add them by clicking a button and filling in the information.

Having only some LDAP users have access is a harder problem.  If they are  different in some consistent way in LDAP it is possible to pick that up and only place some users into the confluence-users group – then as long as you don't allow anonymous access LDAP users not in that group won't be able to use Confluence. (I can't tell you exactly how to do that, but I know it can be done.  I think you need some custom coding to make it work.)