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pablo
Asked: 2011-08-23 12:15:16 +0800 CST

How to find all local user accounts in chef

  • 772

Using opscode chef, is there a way to find or loop over all user accounts?

I need to create a configuration file in each users home directory. I do not want to loop over any directory structure for this.

user-profile user-accounts chef chef-solo

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    All users on the system are automatically detected by ohai when Chef runs, and available in the node['etc'] attribute space. Users are node['etc']['passwd']. You can iterate over this like a hash. You can exclude "system" or "precreated by packages" by comparing whether a user's numeric ID is over whatever is defined in your systems /etc/login.defs UID_MIN.

    Example usage in a recipe to create a config file that you have stored in the cookbook, a different file for each user.

    node['etc']['passwd'].each do |user, data|
  if data['uid'].to_i > 1000

    cookbook_file "#{data['dir']}/custom_config" do
      source "#{user}_custom_config"
      owner user
      group data['gid']
      mode 0644
    end

  end
end

    Replace "custom_config" with whatever your config file is named.

    • 7

  2. It looks like ohai's etc.passwd support is based on Ruby Etc.passwd which reads the /etc/passwd file.

    This could be fine if your users are defined statically like this. If your server has users defined in a remote system like LDAP or NIS then those users will not be in /etc/passwd. You can list them with

    `getent passwd`
    • 0