Description

This cookbook manages user accounts, attributes, and permissions in a
generic, data-driven way. It is a drop-in replacement for Opscode's or
37signals' users cookbook, but it is more flexible.

This cookbook is partially based on Opscode's users cookbook and
users::sysadmins recipe.

Requirements

Attributes

• users.supergroup -- group that is active on all machines, and has superuser rights. Default: sysadmin. Don't change the default to be compatible with Opscode's cookbooks
• users.active_groups -- names of groups to create shell accounts for on the machine.

users.supergroup, if defined, will be added to this list.

If this attribute is not defined, active_groups attribute will be
tried for compatibility with 37signals' cookbook.

Groups in this list will be created as shell groups and users will
be added to them, unless groups data bag item for the group exists
and has shell parameter set to false.

Usage

Two data bags need to be created: users and groups. Second one can
be empty.

The users data bag

Keys recognized:

• id -- ID of data bag item, default username
• username -- username if different from id; it should be used for username policies requiring characters illegal in IDs (e.g. dots)
• groups -- list of groups user belongs to
• comment (optional) -- usually user's real name
• shell -- whether this is a shell account. Can be true (default), false, or a string value. If true or unset, use default shell
• ssh_keys or ssh_key (optional) -- a string or list of strings containing public SSH keys of the user
• openid (optional) -- OpenID URL of the user, added for supergroup members to Apache's mod_auth_openid config
• gid (optional) -- force user's primary group (name or numeric)
• uid (optional) -- force user's numeric id

Arbitrary other keys may be used by other cookbooks.

The groups data bag

Keys recognized:

• id -- group name
• gid (optional) -- force numeric group id
• shell -- whether to create a shell group (boolean, defaults to true).

Arbitrary other keys may be used by other cookbooks.