5. Configuring slapd
Once the software has been built and installed, you are ready to configure slapd(8) for use at your site. Unlike previous OpenLDAP releases, the slapd(8) runtime configuration in 2.3 (and later) is fully LDAP-enabled and can be managed using the standard LDAP operations with data in LDIF. The LDAP configuration engine allows all of slapd's configuration options to be changed on the fly, generally without requiring a server restart for the changes to take effect. The old style slapd.conf(5) file is still supported, but must be converted to the new slapd-config(5) format to allow runtime changes to be saved. While the old style configuration uses a single file, normally installed as /usr/local/etc/openldap/slapd.conf, the new style uses a slapd backend database to store the configuration. The configuration database normally resides in the /usr/local/etc/openldap/slapd.d directory. When converting from the slapd.conf format to slapd.d format, any include files will also be integrated into the resulting configuration database.
An alternate configuration directory (or file) can be specified via a command-line option to slapd(8). This chapter describes the general format of the configuration system, followed by a detailed description of commonly used config settings.
Note: some of the backends and of the distributed overlays do not support runtime configuration yet. In those cases, the old style
slapd.conf(5) file must be used.
