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P4 Server Administration Documentation | 2025.2

# Authentication options

User authentication can take place using any of the following options:

- Using P4 Authentication Service in conjunction with an identity provider (IdP)

- LDAP authentication against an Active Directory or LDAP server that is accessed according to an LDAP specification. Enabling this option disables trigger-based authentication.

- Against P4 Server’s internal user database, `db.user`. This option allows plain-text password-based authentication. It is described in Authentication with password and ticket .

- Against an authentication server, using an authentication trigger. These types of triggers are useful if you need to authenticate users against a non-standard authentication server. Authentication triggers fire when the `p4 login` or `p4 passwd` commands execute. This option is described in the section Triggering to use external authentication.

The authentication server you choose is used for user definitions, user authentication (passwords), group definitions, license details, and ticket generation.

Authentication is configured on a per-user basis (except for trigger-based authentication): for each user, you can specify what method should be used for authentication. Some options are mutually exclusive: enabling configuration-based LDAP authentication turns off trigger-based authentication. However, you can have some users authenticate using LDAP, while others authenticate against P4 Server’s internal user database. To learn more, see Defining authentication for users. When logging in using either authentication method, P4 Server encrypts the password before passing it to the specified authentication agent.

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