
Centralized Authentication with lldap: A Practical Guide
What problem does this solve?
If you’re running a homelab or a small infrastructure with multiple self-hosted services, you’ve probably hit this wall: every service has its own user database. Nextcloud has one, Gitea has another, Portainer has its own, and so on. Add a new team member? You’re creating accounts in five different places. Someone leaves? Good luck remembering where they had access.
LDAP solves this by giving you a single directory where all your users and groups live. Each service connects to this directory instead of maintaining its own user list. You create a user once, assign them to groups, and every connected service knows who they are and what they can access.

