Example 2: Managing Users

Important

The AWS OpsWorks Stacks service reached end of life on May 26, 2024 and has been disabled for both new and existing customers. We strongly recommend customers migrate their workloads to other solutions as soon as possible. If you have questions about migration, reach out to the AWS Support Team on AWS re:Post or through AWS Premium Support.

Another simple task is managing users on an instance. The following recipe adds a new user to a Linux instance.

user "myuser" do
  home "/home/newuser"
  shell "/bin/bash"
end

You use a user resource to manage users on both Linux and Windows systems, although some attributes apply to only one system. The example creates a user named myuser and specifies their home directory and shell. There is no action specified, so the resource uses the default create action. You can add attributes to user to specify a variety of other settings, such as their password or group ID. You can also use user for related user-management tasks such as modifying user settings or deleting users. For more information, see user.

To run the recipe

1. Create a directory within opsworks_cookbooks named newuser and navigate to it.

2. Create a metadata.rb file that contains the following code and save it to newuser.

   name "newuser"
   version "0.1.0"

3. Initialize and configure Test Kitchen, as described in Example 1: Installing Packages, and add a recipes directory inside the newuser directory.

4. Add default.rb file with the example recipe to the cookbook's recipes directory .

5. Run kitchen converge to execute the recipe.

6. Use kitchen login to log in to the instance and verify the new user's existence by running cat /etc/passwd. The myuser user should be at the bottom of the file.