LDAP Authentication Module for Nginx on Debian

To control access to various internal Web sites of a company, a simple method is to enable LDAP authentication on the Web server, so that the company directory can be brought to bear and there is no need to create individual accounts for employees on different systems.

Nginx is one of the most popular free Web servers, it has a lot of built-in modules. Unfortunately, LDAP is not one of them, so we have to compile from the source.

Here are the steps to build a nginx Debian package from source with LDAP module enabled, on Debian 10 buster. While at it, we will also add a nginx virtual host traffic status module.

First install necessary tools:

sudo apt install dpkg-dev devscripts

Now get the source and dependency of nginx

sudo apt source nginx
sudo apt build-dep nginx

It is important to get the LDAP development library, as well as a few necessary libraries.

sudo apt install libldap2-dev libssl-dev libpcre3-dev

Clone nginx-auth-ldap and nginx-module-vts source code that we plan to compile into the nginx binary.

git clone https://github.com/kvspb/nginx-auth-ldap.git
git clone https://github.com/vozlt/nginx-module-vts.git

The part we need to change in the nginx source tree is the Debian rules, which govern how a Debian package is build. Goes into the debian directory of the nginx source folder, and edit the rules file:

cd nginx-1.14.2/debian
vi rules

Add two lines to the end of common_configure_flags

   ... \
   --add-module=<path to>/nginx-auth-ldap \
   --add-module=<path to>/nginx-module-vts

Now goes back and build.

cd ..
debuild -b -uc -us

This may take a while. If the build is successful, the parent directory will now contains a bunch of .deb files and these can be installed with dpkg -i. First install nginx-common_1.14.2-.deb, then libnginx-mod-.deb, finally, nginx-light, full, or extras.