Speed-up ApacheDS LDAP server for testing

Using the ApacheDS for unit testing can be painful if you need to restart/reconfigure the server several times. IT'S SOOO SLOOOOW.

The reason is simple. The default configuration creates a nice directory structure and unpacks all the schema files from JAR file to one of the created directories. Then it creates a file based JDBM partition for you. And it loads your LDIF data to it.

It means many, money, many I/O operations even before the LDAP starts.

Nevertheless, ApacheDS has a nice API to resolve this issue. You will need to make your hands dirty little bit, but it's worth it.

Follow these 3 simple steps and it's all:

1. Create schema partition class, which stores LDAP schema data in-memory only: sample InMemorySchemaPartition.java
2. Create DirectoryServiceFactory implementation, which will use in-memory AvlPartitions instead of JDBM and as a schema partition it will use class from the first step: sample InMemoryDirectoryServiceFactory.java
3. use the new DirectoryServiceFactory to create embedded LDAP

Embedded LDAP

There are 2 simple ways, how to create LDAP server in your unit tests. One uses ApacheDS annotations and the second uses API directly. Here are sample code snippets, which show how to enable the custom InMemoryDirectoryServiceFactory for both of the ways.

Annotations

@CreateDS(
 name = "JBossOrgDS",
 factory=InMemoryDirectoryServiceFactory.class,
 partitions = {
  @CreatePartition(
   name = "jbossorg",
   suffix = "dc=jboss,dc=org",
   contextEntry = @ContextEntry(
    entryLdif =
     "dn: dc=jboss,dc=org\n" +
     "dc: jboss\n" +
     "objectClass: top\n" +
     "objectClass: domain\n\n" )
  )
 })
@CreateLdapServer (
 transports = { @CreateTransport( protocol = "LDAP",  port = 10389, address = "0.0.0.0" ) })
public static void createLdapServer() throws Exception {
 DirectoryService directoryService = DSAnnotationProcessor.getDirectoryService();
 final SchemaManager schemaManager = directoryService.getSchemaManager();
 //import your LDIF here
 ServerAnnotationProcessor.instantiateLdapServer((CreateLdapServer) AnnotationUtils.getInstance(CreateLdapServer.class), directoryService).start();
}

API

DirectoryServiceFactory dsf = new InMemoryDirectoryServiceFactory();
dsf.init("JBossOrgDS");
DirectoryService directoryService = dsf.getDirectoryService();
SchemaManager schemaManager = masterDirectoryService.getSchemaManager();

PartitionFactory pf = dsf.getPartitionFactory();
Partition p = pf.createPartition(schemaManager, "jbossorg", "dc=jboss,dc=org", 1000, workingDir);
p.initialize();
directoryService.addPartition(p);

//import LDIF here

LdapServer ldapServer = new LdapServer();
ldapServer.setServiceName("DefaultLDAP");
Transport ldap = new TcpTransport( "0.0.0.0", 10389, 3, 5 );
ldapServer.addTransports(ldap);
ldapServer.setDirectoryService(directoryService);
ldapServer.start();

I bet your ApacheDS startup time falls down at least by 50% with these in-memory settings.