Bulk Upload users into LDAP Directory

In this post I am not going to talk about setting up your LDAP using OpenLDAP. There are lots of websites explaining that. However when I tried to upload users in bulk into the directory I was not able to do the same. The reason there was not even a single article which could give me some information on the same. So here is how to do it.

Environment: Ubuntu 10.04 Server OS, OpenLDAP with phpldapadmin.

I had the user list with the first name and the last name and the email address. I converted this spreadsheet into a .CSV file.

# sudo su - (only for convenience)
 
# cat user-file.csv

Krishnan, Sethuraman, krishnan@mydomain.com
Anidha, Krishnan, anidha@mydomain.com
Tanya, Krishnan, tanya@mydomain.com

My requirement was to populate the following attributes in the LDAP.

dn: uid=krishnan,ou=people,o=mycompany
changetype: add
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectclass: top
cn: Krishnan Sethuraman
sn: Sethuraman
uid: krishnan
mail: krishnan@mydomain.com
userPassword:
givenName: Krishnan

I want the password to be in SHA, so I do the following first.

# slappasswd -h {SHA}
new password:
Re-enter new password:
{SHA}iQ55k3YmnmWt/VyJXIRbY

I will be using this as the password for the users.

Now I want to retrieve the values that I require from the user-file.csv file. For this I performed the following tasks.

# cat user-file.csv

# cat user-file.csv | awk -F "@" '{print $1}'

This command displayed all the values other than the @mydomain.com. I do not want to populate @mydomain.com in the ldif file. Then I import these results into a file.

# cat user-file.csv | awk -F "@" '{print $1}' > temp-user-file.csv

# cat temp-user-file.csv


Krishnan, Sethuraman, krishnan
Anidha, Krishnan, anidha
Tanya, Krishnan, tanya

# cat temp-user-file.csv | awk -F "," '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3}'

The above command gave the following results.

Krishnan Sethuraman krishnan
Anidha Krishnan anidha
Tanya Krishnan tanya

After confirming the above result was correct, I went ahead and converted the csv file into the ldif with the format that I wanted and the for that I typed the following command. 

# cat temp-user-file.csv | awk -F "," '{print "dn: uid="$3",ou=people,o=mycompany\nobjectClass: inetOrgPerson\nobjectclass: top\ncn: "$1" " " "$2"\nsn: "$2"\nuid: "$3"\nmail: "$3"@mycompany.com\nuserPassword: {SHA}iQ55k3YmnmWt/VyJXIRbY=\ngivenName: "$1"\n"}'

The above command gave me the following command.

dn: uid=krishnan,ou=people,o=mycompany
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectclass: top
cn: Krishnan Sethuraman
sn: Sethuraman
uid: krishnan
mail: krishnan@mycompany.com
userPassword: {SHA}iQ55k3YmnmWt/VyJXIRbY=
givenName: Krishnan

dn: uid=anidha,ou=people,o=mycompany
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectclass: top
cn: Anidha Krishnan
sn: Krishnan
uid: anidha
mail: anidha@mycompany.com
userPassword: {SHA}iQ55k3YmnmWt/VyJXIRbY=
givenName:Anidha

dn: uid=tanya,ou=people,o=mycompany
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectclass: top
cn: Tanya Krishnan
sn: Krishnan
uid: tanya
mail: tanya@mycompany.com
userPassword: {SHA}iQ55k3YmnmWt/VyJXIRbY=
givenName: Tanya

I was satisfied with this result. Hence I now move the output into the ldif file of my choice.

# cat temp-user-file.csv | awk -F "," '{print "dn: uid="$3",ou=people,o=mycompany\nobjectClass: inetOrgPerson\nobjectclass: top\ncn: "$1" " " "$2"\nsn: "$2"\nuid: "$3"\nmail: "$3"@mycompany.com\nuserPassword: {SHA}iQ55k3YmnmWt/VyJXIRbY=\ngivenName: "$1"\n"}' > user-ldap-upload.ldif

Once I had the ldif file I then entered these values into the LDAP directory with the following command.

# ldapadd -a -D "cn=ldapadmin,o=mycompany" -w ldapadminpassword -H ldapi:/// -f user-ldap-upload.ldif

Success.