6. Running slapd
slapd(8) is designed to be run as a stand-alone server. This allows the server to take advantage of caching, manage concurrency issues with underlying databases, and conserve system resources. Running from inetd(8) is NOT an option.
6.1. Command-Line Options
slapd(8) supports a number of command-line options as detailed in the manual page. This section details a few commonly used options.
-f <filename>
This option specifies an alternate configuration file for slapd. The default is normally /usr/local/etc/openldap/slapd.conf.
-h <URLs>
This option specifies alternative listener configurations. The default is ldap:/// which implies LDAP over TCP on all interfaces on the default LDAP port 389. You can specify specific host-port pairs or other protocol schemes (such as ldaps:// or ldapi://). For example, -h "ldaps:// ldap://127.0.0.1:666" will create two listeners: one for LDAP over SSL on all interfaces on the default LDAP/SSL port 636, and one for LDAP over TCP on the localhost (loopback) interface on port 666. Hosts may be specified using IPv4 dotted-decimal form or using host names. Port values must be numeric.
-n <service-name>
This option specifies the service name used for logging and other purposes. The default service name is slapd.
-l <syslog-local-user>
This option specifies the local user for the syslog(8) facility. Values can be LOCAL0, LOCAL1, LOCAL2, ..., and LOCAL7. The default is LOCAL4. This option may not be supported on all systems.
-u user -g group
These options specify the user and group, respectively, to run as. user can be either a user name or uid. group can be either a group name or gid.
-r directory
This option specifies a run-time directory. slapd will chroot(2) to this directory after opening listeners but before reading any configuration files or initializing any backends.
-d <level> | ?
This option sets the slapd debug level to <level>. When level is a `?' character, the various debugging levels are printed and slapd exits, regardless of any other options you give it. Current debugging levels are
| Level | Description |
| -1 | enable all debugging |
| 0 | no debugging |
| 1 | trace function calls |
| 2 | debug packet handling |
| 4 | heavy trace debugging |
| 8 | connection management |
| 16 | print out packets sent and received |
| 32 | search filter processing |
| 64 | configuration file processing |
| 128 | access control list processing |
| 256 | stats log connections/operations/results |
| 512 | stats log entries sent |
| 1024 | print communication with shell backends |
| 2048 | print entry parsing debugging |
You may enable multiple levels by specifying the debug option once for each desired level. Or, since debugging levels are additive, you can do the math yourself. That is, if you want to trace function calls and watch the config file being processed, you could set level to the sum of those two levels (in this case, -d 65). Or, you can let slapd do the math, (e.g. -d 1 -d 64). Consult <ldap.h> for more details.
Note: slapd must have been compiled with -DLDAP_DEBUG defined for any debugging information beyond the two stats levels to be available.
6.2. Starting slapd
In general, slapd is run like this:
/usr/local/etc/libexec/slapd [<option>]*
where /usr/local/etc/libexec is determined by configure and <option> is one of the options described above (or in slapd(8)). Unless you have specified a debugging level (including level 0), slapd will automatically fork and detach itself from its controlling terminal and run in the background.
6.3. Stopping slapd
To kill off slapd safely, you should give a command like this
kill -INT `cat /usr/local/var/slapd.pid`
where /usr/local/var is determined by configure.
Killing slapd by a more drastic method may cause information loss or database corruption.