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users Cookbook

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Manages OS users and groups (optionally from databags).

Scope

This cookbook is concerned with the management of OS users and groups (optionally from databags). It also manages the distribution of ssh keys to a user's home directory.

Maintainers

This cookbook is maintained by the Sous Chefs. The Sous Chefs are a community of Chef cookbook maintainers working together to maintain important cookbooks. If you’d like to know more please visit sous-chefs.org or come chat with us on the Chef Community Slack in #sous-chefs.

Requirements

If you are upgrading from a version < 6.0.0 please see upgrading.md

Platforms

The following platforms have been tested with Test Kitchen:

Chef

Cookbooks

Usage

To use the resource users_manage, make sure to add the dependency on the users cookbook by the following line to your wrapper cookbook's metadata.rb:

depends 'users'

or to pin to a specific version of the users cookbook, in this case any version of 6.X:

depends 'users', '~> 6'

Then in a recipe use the user_manage resource to add all users in the defined group to the system:

users_variable = [{
  id: 'databag_test_user',
  ssh_keys: "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAklOUpkDHrfHY17SbrmTIpNLTGK9Tjom/BWDSU\nGPl+nafzlHDTYW7hdI4yZ5ew18JH4JW9jbhUFrviQzM7xlELEVf4h9lFX5QVkbPppSwg0cda3\nPbv7kOdJ/MTyBlWXFCR+HAo3FXRitBqxiX1nKhXpHAZsMciLq8V6RjsNAQwdsdMFvSlVK/7XA\nt3FaoJoAsncM1Q9x5+3V0Ww68/eIFmb1zuUFljQJKprrX88XypNDvjYNby6vw/Pb0rwert/En\nmZ+AW4OZPnTPI89ZPmVMLuayrD2cE86Z/il8b+gw3r3+1nKatmIkjn2so1d01QraTlMqVSsbx\nNrRFi9wrf+M7Q== chefuser@mylaptop.local",
  groups: [ 'GROUPNAME' ],
}]

users_manage 'GROUPNAME' do
  group_id GROUPID
  action [:create]
  users users_variable
end

Example:

users_manage 'testgroup' do
  group_id 3000
  action [:create]
  users node['users']['array_of_users']
end

Note: The users property needs to be given an Array of Hashes that contains one user per hash. This can be done by passing a data bag like the example below or from any other source.

Databag Definition

This is an alternative to the attribute definition as mentioned below.

You could for instance create a databag called users. You then create a subdatabag for each user object.

A sample user object in a users databag would look like:

{
  "id": "test_user",
  "password": "$1$5cE1rI/9$4p0fomh9U4kAI23qUlZVv/",
  "ssh_keys": [
    "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAklOUpkDHrfHY17SbrmTIpNLTGK9Tjom/BWDSU\nGPl+nafzlHDTYW7hdI4yZ5ew18JH4JW9jbhUFrviQzM7xlELEVf4h9lFX5QVkbPppSwg0cda3\nPbv7kOdJ/MTyBlWXFCR+HAo3FXRitBqxiX1nKhXpHAZsMciLq8V6RjsNAQwdsdMFvSlVK/7XA\nt3FaoJoAsncM1Q9x5+3V0Ww68/eIFmb1zuUFljQJKprrX88XypNDvjYNby6vw/Pb0rwert/En\nmZ+AW4OZPnTPI89ZPmVMLuayrD2cE86Z/il8b+gw3r3+1nKatmIkjn2so1d01QraTlMqVSsbx\nNrRFi9wrf+M7Q== chefuser@mylaptop.local",
    "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAklOUpkDHrfHY17SbrmTIpNLTGK9Tjom/BWDSU\nGPl+nafzlHDTYW7hdI4yZ5ew18JH4JW9jbhUFrviQzM7xlELEVf4h9lFX5QVkbPppSwg0cda3\nPbv7kOdJ/MTyBlWXFCR+HAo3FXRitBqxiX1nKhXpHAZsMciLq8V6RjsNAQwdsdMFvSlVK/7XA\nt3FaoJoAsncM1Q9x5+3V0Ww68/eIFmb1zuUFljQJKprrX88XypNDvjYNby6vw/Pb0rwert/En\nmZ+AW4OZPnTPI89ZPmVMLuayrD2cE86Z/il8b+gw3r3+1nKatmIkjn2so1d01QraTlMqVSsbx\nNQCPO0ZZEa1== chefuser@mylaptop.local"
  ],
  "groups": [ "testgroup", "nfsgroup" ],
  "uid": 9001,
  "shell": "\/bin\/bash",
  "comment": "Test User"
}

A sample user to remove from a system would like like:

{
  "id": "mwaddams",
  "action": "remove",
  "groups": [ "testgroup", "nfsgroup" ]
}

Attributes Definition

This is an alternative to the data bag definition as mentioned above.

Consider having a cookbook called usermanagement where you include this users cookbook.

You could then set the attributes like this:

default['usermanagement']['users'] = [
  {
    id: 'test_user',
    password: '$1$5cE1rI/9$4p0fomh9U4kAI23qUlZVv/',
    ssh_keys: [
      "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAklOUpkDHrfHY17SbrmTIpNLTGK9Tjom/BWDSU\nGPl+nafzlHDTYW7hdI4yZ5ew18JH4JW9jbhUFrviQzM7xlELEVf4h9lFX5QVkbPppSwg0cda3\nPbv7kOdJ/MTyBlWXFCR+HAo3FXRitBqxiX1nKhXpHAZsMciLq8V6RjsNAQwdsdMFvSlVK/7XA\nt3FaoJoAsncM1Q9x5+3V0Ww68/eIFmb1zuUFljQJKprrX88XypNDvjYNby6vw/Pb0rwert/En\nmZ+AW4OZPnTPI89ZPmVMLuayrD2cE86Z/il8b+gw3r3+1nKatmIkjn2so1d01QraTlMqVSsbx\nNrRFi9wrf+M7Q== chefuser@mylaptop.local",
      "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAklOUpkDHrfHY17SbrmTIpNLTGK9Tjom/BWDSU\nGPl+nafzlHDTYW7hdI4yZ5ew18JH4JW9jbhUFrviQzM7xlELEVf4h9lFX5QVkbPppSwg0cda3\nPbv7kOdJ/MTyBlWXFCR+HAo3FXRitBqxiX1nKhXpHAZsMciLq8V6RjsNAQwdsdMFvSlVK/7XA\nt3FaoJoAsncM1Q9x5+3V0Ww68/eIFmb1zuUFljQJKprrX88XypNDvjYNby6vw/Pb0rwert/En\nmZ+AW4OZPnTPI89ZPmVMLuayrD2cE86Z/il8b+gw3r3+1nKatmIkjn2so1d01QraTlMqVSsbx\nNQCPO0ZZEa1== chefuser@mylaptop.local"
    ],
    groups: %w(testgroup nfsgroup),
    uid: 9001,
    shell: '/bin/bash',
    comment: 'Test User'
  },
  {
     id: 'mwaddams',
     action: 'remove',
     groups: %w(testgroup nfsgroup)
  }
]

User Key Definitions

Other potential fields (optional):

Resources Overview

users_manage

The users_manage resource manages users and groups based off the users property or of a data bag search and the specified action(s).

Examples

Creates the sysadmin group and users defined in the users databag.

# Get the users from the data bag
users_from_databag = search('users', '*:*')

users_manage 'sysadmin' do
  group_id 2300
  action [:create]
  users users_from_databag
end

Creates the testgroup group, and users defined in the test_home_dir attribute.

users_manage 'testgroup' do
  group_id 3000
  action [:create]
  users node['test_home_dir']
end

Creates the nfsgroup group, and users defined in the test_home_dir local variable and does not manage nfs home directories.

users_manage 'nfsgroup' do
  group_id 4000
  action [:create]
  users test_home_dir
  manage_nfs_home_dirs false
end

Parameters

Reminder users_manage module will only create the user as long as the user's group (groups array) in the attribute or databag includes the users_manage's group name.

Recipe Overview

Recipes are not directly used. Please include the users_manage resource directly in your cookbook.

Data bag Overview

Reminder You do not have to use data bags, you can also pass the users directly to the resource from a different source as explained above.

Reminder Data bags generally should not be stored in cookbooks, but in a policy repo within your organization. Data bags are useful across cookbooks, not just for a single cookbook.

Use knife to create a data bag for users.

knife data bag create users

Create a user in the data_bag/users/ directory.

An optional password hash can be specified that will be used as the user's password.

The hash can be generated with the following command.

openssl passwd -1 "plaintextpassword"

Note: The ssh_keys attribute below can be either a String or an Array. However, we are recommending the use of an Array.

{
  "id": "bofh",
  "ssh_keys": "ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nz...yhCw== bofh"
}

{
  "id": "bofh",
  "password": "$1$d...HgH0",
  "ssh_keys": [
    "ssh-rsa AAA123...xyz== foo",
    "ssh-rsa AAA456...uvw== bar"
  ],
  "groups": [ "sysadmin", "dba", "devops" ],
  "uid": 2001,
  "shell": "\/bin\/bash",
  "comment": "BOFH"
}

You can pass any action listed in the user resource for Chef via the "action" option. For Example:

Lock a user, johndoe1.

knife data bag edit users johndoe1

And then change the action to "lock":

{
  "id": "johndoe1",
  "groups": ["sysadmin", "dba", "devops"],
  "uid": 2002,
  "action": "lock", // <--
  "comment": "User violated access policy"
}

Remove a user, johndoe1.

knife data bag edit users johndoe1

And then change the action to "remove":

{
  "id": "johndoe1",
  "groups": [ "sysadmin", "dba", "devops" ],
  "uid": 2002,
  "action": "remove", // <--
  "comment": "User quit, retired, or fired."
}

If you have different requirements, for example:

Putting these requirements together our recipe might look like this:

users_manage "postmaster" do
  data_bag "mail"
  group_name "wheel"
  group_id 10
end

Knife supports reading data bags from a file and automatically looks in a directory called +data_bags+ in the current directory. The "bag" should be a directory with JSON files of each item. For the above:

$ mkdir data_bags/users
$EDITOR data_bags/users/bofh.json

Paste the user's public SSH key into the ssh_keys value. Also make sure the uid is unique, and if you're not using bash, that the shell is installed.

The Apache cookbook can set up authentication using OpenIDs, which is set up using the openid key here. See the Chef Software 'apache2' cookbook for more information about this.

Contributors

This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute.

Backers

Thank you to all our backers!

https://opencollective.com/sous-chefs#backers

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