[PHP-DEV] Deprecate ldap_connect with host and port as separate arguments

[Andreas Heigl]

Hey Folks.




Wait: What?

Currently there are three ways one can call ldap_connect.

1. With a string $ldap_uri
2. With a string $host and an int $port,
3. With even more parameters for those that did compile PHP with OracleLDAP.

I think it would be a good idea to deprecate calling ldap_connect with 2 parameters host and port. The 3rd way of calling it is not even documented in the docs as it is a very niche edge-case that would only confuse most people. The 2nd way of calling the function is based on the since some years deprecated underlying ldap_open function. Internally we already moved to the underlying ldap_initialize-function that requires passing an LDAP-URI. For that we are already converting the passed host and port into an LDAP-URI of the form 'ldap://$host:$port'.

ldap_connect($host, $port)

one calls

ldap_connect("ldap://$host:$port??369";)

This already illustrates one of the issues that this way of calling the function implies: It is not possible to use ldaps as a schema using that way of calling ldap_connect as it will always use ldap as schema. No matter which port is passed. A second reason why I think we should deprecate calling ldap_connect with two parameters is, that it does not allow one to pass multiple ldap-servers as it is possible using the LDAP-URI. This is for sure a BC-break but in my opinion a rather small one as there are not many users actually using it and there is a clear and easy migration path for those that use it: Instead of calling Also most of the users should not be affected at all as they are using 3rd party libraries that are already only using an LDAP-URI when calling ldap_connect like Laminas\Ldap or Symfony\Ldap The documentation at https://www.php.net/ldap_connect also explicitly states (for some time by now) that using host and port is considered deprecated.

Named parameters btw also only support ldap_connect(uri: 'ldap://example.com') and ldap_connect(host:'example.com', port:369) will throw an error.

Thanks for your comments.

Cheers

Andreas

[1] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/5177

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| Andreas Heigl                                                       |
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| https://andreas.heigl.org                                           |
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There already is a PR open[1] that implements the deprecation so that for the upcoming PHP8 releases each call to ldap_connect with 2 parameters would emit a deprecation message so that people have enough time to adapt their code before we can actually remove using two parameters in the next major release.

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