user_shadow

A library cookbook to provide a resource for modifying user shadow attributes.

Supported Platforms

• Centos 6.7
• Ubuntu 12.04
• Ubuntu 14.04

Requirements

The library depends on the chage binary being installed on the targe system. The chage binary is part of the shadow-utils package on RHEL/CentOS and part of the passwd package on Ubuntu (these packages are usually installed by default).

Usage

Place a dependency on the user_shadow cookbook in your cookbook's metadata.rb

depends 'user_shadow'

Then, in your recipe

# myrecipe.rb
user_shadow 'testuser'
  sp_lstchg '2015-07-01'
  sp_expire '2030-08-30'
  sp_min 20
  sp_max 60
  sp_inact 10
  sp_warn 10
end

The user to modify is testuser. See a full list of parameters and explanation below.

Resource overview

The user_shadow resource modifies the shadow attributes of a user. There is only one action defined, :set which writes the new values on the corresponding attributes.

Parameters

• user - String that denotes the user to be modified. Defaults to the name of the resource.
• sp_lstchg - String that denotes the date when the user's password was last changed. Must be in YYYY-MM-DD format. No default.
• sp_expire - String that denotes the date when the account expires. Must be in YYYY-MM-DD format. No default.
• sp_min - Number that denotes the minimum number of days between password changes. No default.
• sp_max - Number that denotes the maximum number of days between password changes. No default.
• sp_inact - Number that denotes the days after password expire until account is disabled. No default.
• sp_warn - Number that denotes the number of days to warn before password expires. No default.
• chage - Path to the chage binary. Defaults to /usr/bin/chage

Actions

• :set - Modifies the corresponding attributes. Default action. If there are no parameters set the resource doesn't do anything.

Out of scope

This library cookbook doesn't deal (now or in the future) with managing the encrypted password for the user in /etc/shadow. This can be managed through the built-in Chef user resource.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository on Github
2. Create a named feature branch (i.e. add-my-feature)
3. Write your change
4. Write tests for your change (if applicable)
5. Run the tests, ensuring they all pass
6. Submit a Pull Request

License and Authors

Author:: Kostas Georgakopoulos (kostas.georgakopoulos@rackspace.co.uk)