Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

lastmod 2026-02-03created 2014-01-0912 edits

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services over TCP/IP. A directory is a set of objects with similar attributes, organized in a logical and hierarchical manner. The most common example is the telephone directory, which has a series of names in alphabetical order, each with a phone number and address. Because of this basic design, LDAP is often used by other services for authentication. An LDAP directory tree may reflect various political, geographic, and organizational boundaries depending on the chosen model. Today's LDAP deployments tend to use Domain Name System names to structure the top levels of the hierarchy. The deeper you go into the directory, the more entries representing people, organizations, printers, documents, groups, and so on appear. The current version of LDAP is LDAPv3.

See also

• Directory service
• OpenLDAP
• Avahi

Favorite site

• Wikipedia (en) LDAP
• [Recommended] LDAP Linux HOWTO
• [Recommended] Everything about LDAP 2 ¹

References