Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation

Adding users

We will need a recipe to manage our users; here, we will use the users cookbook. We will create one user, webuser, which will be the account that is used for deployment and user connectivity. We will define our user in a JSON file similar to what we did in the previous chapter; place the following in a users/webuser.json file:

{
  "id" : "webuser",
  "uid" : "1000",
  "gid" : 1000,
  "shell" : "/bin/bash",
  "comment" : "Webapp deployment user",
  "groups" : ["webusers"]
}

Then, you can load this user using the from file command:

knife data bag from file users users

Ensure that your hosts have our new users by editing the base_server role and adding our webusers group so that any users in that group will be provisioned on all our servers that incorporate ...