Shane Sherman

ruby-ldap is a ruby module for communicating with LDAP, also know as ActiveDirectory for Windows. Unfortunately there is not a windows version of the module. I found a site that explained how to compile and get it working for windows, but it looks like the site is dead now, so I am going to go ahead and explain how I got it working.

Requirements

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Platform SDK
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition

Step-by-Step

1. Download the ruby-ldap source. Make sure you get the tar.gz file and decompress it to a temp dir.
2. Goto C:\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mswin32(or wherever you installed Ruby too) and open up the file "config.h" in your favorite text-editor. The first 3 lines should look like this:
   PLAIN TEXT
   C++:

   1. #if _MSC_VER != 1200
   2.   #error MSC version unmatch
   3.   #endif

   Basically what these 3 lines are saying is that if the microsoft compiler is not equal to version 1200(some internal code), then raise an error. The 2005 compiler that we will be using is not version 1200, so to get ruby-ldap compiled we need to remove these 3 lines. Feel free to add them back afterwards.

3. We now need to correctly setup our environment and environment variables. All I did to get this to work was to run "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Open Build Environment Window\Windows XP 32-bit Build Environment\Set Windows XP 32-bit Build Environment (Retail)". Running this should launch a cmd window. Navigate to the ruby-ldap source directory. I should mention that the previous article that is now gone that explained how to do this, had a couple more steps required on getting your environment setup correctly. This is all I did and it worked fine for me though.
4. Execute the follow command from the window we launched in the last step.
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   CODE:

   1. ruby extconf.rb --with-wldap32

5. Run
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   CODE:

   1. nmake

   You should now have a ldap.so file.

6. Now we need to embed the manifest so the module will work.
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   CODE:

   1. mt -outputresource:ldap.so;2 -manifest ldap.so.manifest

   The original article mentioned that you need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable, but I didn't have to.

7. Now it's time to create the gem. Create a ldap.gemspec file and paste this code into it:
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   RUBY:

   1. Gem::Specification.new do |spec|
   2.   spec.authors = ["Takaaki Tateishi", "Ian Macdonald"]
   3.   spec.email = 'ian@caliban.org'
   4.   spec.name = 'ldap'
   5.   spec.summary = 'LDAP library for Ruby'
   6.   spec.description = <<-EOF
   7.     ldap is a Ruby library to perform queries on an LDAP server
   8.   EOF
   9.   spec.version = '0.9.7'
   10.   spec.autorequire = 'ldap'
   11.   spec.platform = Gem::Platform::WIN32
   12.   spec.files = Dir['lib/**/*.rb'] + Dir['lib/*.so']
   13.   spec.required_ruby_version = '>= 1.8.0'
   14.   spec.require_paths = ['lib']
   15. end

8. Move the module into the lib directory so Ruby will find it.
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   CODE:

   1. move ldap.so lib

9. It's time to build the gem.
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   CODE:

   1. gem build ldap.gemspec

10. Install the gem.
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    CODE:

    1. gem install ldap-x.y.z-mswin32.gem

That's is all. The original site I got most of this stuff from is here. It looks like he deleted all his old posts though. The Google cache of all his related articles are here, here, and here.

Tags: ldap, Programming, Ruby