ansible-users

Role to manage users on a system.

Role configuration

• users_create_per_user_group (default: true) - when creating users, also create a group with the same username and make that the user's primary group.
• users_group (default: users) - if users_create_per_user_group is not set, then this is the primary group for all created users.
• users_default_shell (default: /bin/bash) - the default shell if none is specified for the user.
• users_create_homedirs (default: true) - create home directories for new users. Set this to false if you manage home directories separately.

Creating users

Add a users variable containing the list of users to add. A good place to put this is in group_vars/all or group_vars/groupname if you only want the users to be on certain machines.

The following attributes are required for each user:

• username - The user's username.
• name - The full name of the user (gecos field).
• home - The home directory of the user to create (optional, defaults to /home/username).
• uid - The numeric user id for the user (optional). This is required for uid consistency across systems.
• gid - The numeric group id for the group (optional). Otherwise, the uid will be used.
• password - If a hash is provided then that will be used, but otherwise the account will be locked.
• update_password - This can be either 'always' or 'on_create'
  • 'always' will update passwords if they differ. (default)
  • 'on_create' will only set the password for newly created users.
• group - Optional primary group override.
• groups - A list of supplementary groups for the user.
• append - If yes, will only add groups, not set them to just the list in groups (optional).
• profile - A string block for setting custom shell profiles.
• ssh_key - This should be a list of SSH keys for the user (optional). Each SSH key should be included directly and should have no newlines.
• generate_ssh_key - Whether to generate a SSH key for the user (optional, defaults to no).

In addition, the following items are optional for each user:

• shell - The user's shell. This defaults to /bin/bash. The default is configurable using the users_default_shell variable if you want to give all users the same shell, but it is different than /bin/bash.

Example:

---
users:
  - username: foo
    name: Foo Barrington
    groups: ['wheel','systemd-journal']
    uid: 1001
    home: /local/home/foo
    profile: |
      alias ll='ls -lah'
    ssh_key:
      - "ssh-rsa AAAAA.... foo@machine"
      - "ssh-rsa AAAAB.... foo2@machine"
groups_to_create:
  - name: developers
    gid: 10000
users_deleted:
  - username: bar
    name: Bar User
    uid: 1002

Deleting users

The users_deleted variable contains a list of users who should no longer be in the system, and these will be removed on the next ansible run. The format is the same as for users to add, but the only required field is username. However, it is recommended that you also keep the uid field for reference so that numeric user ids are not accidentally reused.

You can optionally choose to remove the user's home directory and mail spool with the remove parameter, and force removal of files with the force parameter.

users_deleted:
  - username: bar
    uid: 1002
    remove: yes
    force: yes