Re: Config: Reading value from file for password does not work

René Neumann via dovecot <[email protected]> Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:06:24 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.mail.imap.dovecot
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Ok, classic PEBKAC: I forgot to restart dovecot while setting this up. 
Only when I enabled debugging, it started to work (due to me restarting 
the server).

The permissions did not seem to make a difference, I set them 
nevertheless to avoid possible problems down the road.

Thanks,
René

Am 19.04.26 um 17:14 schrieb Aki Tuomi via dovecot:
> I wonder if it would be better solution to use $ENV:LDAP_AUTH_DN_PASSWORD instead? Also, the file you read the password needs to be root:dovecot 0640
> 
> Aki
> 
>> On 19/04/2026 18:07 EEST René Neumann via dovecot <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>   
>> Forgot to add: I'm using dovecot v2.4.3
>>
>> Am 19.04.26 um 15:52 schrieb René Neumann via dovecot:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I want to read the ldap auth-dn password from a file to avoid having it
>>> as part of the configuration (which may be checked into VCS).
>>>
>>> I specified
>>>
>>> ldap_auth_dn_password = </some/file
>>>
>>> where /some/file contains the password without extra whitespace (esp.
>>> there is no `\n`, I checked with xxd).
>>>
>>> But ldap auth does not succeed because of a wrong password. Password
>>> itself does work though, as checked with ldapsearch (even using the same
>>> file as password provider)
>>>
>>> `doveconf -x -P` *does* show the correct value.
>>>
>>> The same issue has been reported back in 2019 [1], without any reply
>>> though :-/
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> René
>>>
>>> [1] https://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2019-September/117100.html
>>>
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