[Answer]-Customizing / extending / monkey patching Django Auth Backend

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To be modular, DRY and true to the django philosophy in general, you need to create a class named LDAPBackendEx that would inherit from LDAPBackend and use this class to your AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS instead of django_auth_ldap.backend.LDAPBackend. Also, you’dd create an LDAPUserEx that would inhert from _LDAPUser and override the _check_required_groups method.

So, the LDAPUserEx would be something like:

class LDAPUserEx(_LDAPUser):
    def _check_required_group(self):
        pass # Put your implementation here !

Now, concerning the implementation of LDAPBackendEx: Unfortuanately there is no way of defining a custom _LDAPUser class so you’d have to search every method that uses the _LDAPUser class and override it with LDAPUserEx. The correct methdod of implementing django-auth-ldap (and if we actually needed to be modular) would be to add an user_class attribute to LDAPBackend, initialize it to _LDAPUser and use that instead of _LDAPUser.

Checking the code here, I found out that the methods of LDAPBackend that refer _LDAPUser are authenticate, get_user and get_group_permissions. So, the implementation of LDAPBackendEx would be something like this:

class LDAPBackendEx(LDAPBackend):
    def authenticate(self, username, password):
        ldap_user = LDAPUserEx(self, username=username)
        user = ldap_user.authenticate(password)
        return user

   def get_user(self, user_id):
       pass # please put definition of get_user here changing _LDAPUser to LDAPUserEx

   def get_group_permissions(self, user):
       pass # please put definition of get_group_permissions here changing _LDAPUser to LDAPUserEx
👤Serafeim

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