Using chef to add a user

This is part of my quest to sort out my website. Using chef to add a user.

While I could continue to log into my new EC2 instance as the default ubuntu user, I’d prefer to use my own user account. Let’s get chef to create my user account.

Using the ‘users’ community cookbook

Note: This is cribbed from Managing Users and SSH Keys in a Hybrid World

Add the cookbook (and its dependencies) to Berksfile:

cookbook 'users'
cookbook 'sudo'
cookbook 'chef-solo-search'

Create a databag

mkdir -p data_bags/users

Configure the new user

Create a file data_bags/users/roger.json:

{
    "id"       : "roger",
    "comment"  : "Roger Lipscombe",
    "shell"    : "/bin/bash",
    "groups"   : "sysadmin",
    "ssh_keys" : [
        "ssh-rsa AAAAB3...== roger"
    ]
}

Configure the role

In roles/base.rb, edit it as follows:

run_list(
    # ...
    'chef-solo-search',
    'users::sysadmins'
)

sudoers

• TODO

bash_profile

• TODO