[Python] python-ldap installation and usage notes

Installation

python-ldap installation is very simple. On CentOS 7, you just need to

# install openldap-devel
yum install openldap-devel

# then install python-ldap via pip
pip install python-ldap

Usage

To use it, you can refer to the third-party get started docs on it’s website

There are some tricky points when looking at its API doc.

For example, you can see there is a ldap.filter module. Based on my understanding, the first time I tried to import the module in the following manner.

>>> import ldap
>>> ldap.filter
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'filter'

It seems that there is no filter module in ldap. But the doc says it’s there. Then I tried this.

import ldap.filter
help(ldap.filter)

This time, it works.