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. You can set hash_behaviour = merge (see https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.4/intro_configuration.html#hash-behaviour) in your ansible configuration, add all users in group_vars/all and manage users in group_vars/groupname only by state field.

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).
• state - Should be 'present'

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:

group_vars/all

---
users:
  foo:
    name: Foo Barrington
    state: present
    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"
  bar:
    name: Bar Man 
    state: absent
    groups: ['wheel','systemd-journal']
    uid: 1002
    home: /local/home/bar
    profile: |
      alias ll='ls -lah'
    ssh_key:
      - "ssh-rsa AAAAA.... bar@machine"
      - "ssh-rsa AAAAB.... bar2@machine"
groups_to_create:
  - name: developers
    gid: 10000

group_vars/groupname

---
users:
  bar:
    state: present

Deleting users

To delete a user you must set 'state' field to 'absent'. 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:
  bar:
    uid: 1002
    state: absent
    remove: yes
    force: yes