I want to use the PhabricatorLDAPAuthProvider as a backend to fetch user information in another part of the code. Thus I need the provider, but do not want it to show up on the login page (that would be confusing, because there would be two ways to login for our users – the convenient way and LDAP).
I wrote a patch that simply hides the LDAP login form from the login page (depending on a config checkbox), but maybe you want to take a different approach?
We would need to have a clearer understanding of how many and why installs want to do this. For now patching your local install sounds like the correct approach.
My exact usecase:
I can show you patches for both the hide-loginform part, as well as the LDAPAuth* patch and the one to libphremoteuser, if that helps you.
Gluing two providers together in this way is not a use case we're interested in supporting in the upstream.
You can implement a single provider which understands both REMOTE_USER and LDAP, which will resolve this issue, or you can maintain a small local patch to cover up the hack of using two providers instead of a single provider.