Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing LDAP Authentication in Spring Boot

Introduction

In this tutorial am going to walk you through how to configure LDAP authentication in Spring Boot. LDAP is used as a central repository for user information. Applications then connect to this repository for user searches and authentication. Spring Boot offers auto-configuration for any compliant LDAP server as well as support for the embedded in-memory LDAP server. This tutorial assumes you are already familiar with the Spring Boot.

Dependencies

Below is the pom.xml file detailing the dependencies used in the illustration.

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-ldap</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.ldap</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-ldap-core</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-ldap</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>…