new-user.md

How to add a new user to the server (staging/production)

This document explains how you can authenticate someone to access the server, as admin or normal user.

Normal user (no admin)

In general, if someone wants to be of any use in the server, add them as an admin.

To add non-privileged user, expand the users property in /ansible/group_vars/all/users.yml to include a new user:

  - name: "pietjankbal"
    admin: false
    home_prefix: "/home"
    state: "present"
    github_accounts:
      - username: "pietJankbalOnGithub"
        state: "present"

Admin

Similarly to the normal user, you should add the following to the users property in /ansible/group_vars/all/users.yml:

  - name: "pietjankbal"
    admin: true
    home_prefix: "/home"
    state: "present"
    github_accounts:
      - username: "pietJankbalOnGithub"
        state: "present"

Now to Linux, the new user is an admin. To tell Ansible that this user has the rights to run playbooks, add the following info to the ansible user in the users property:

  - username: "pietJankbalOnGithub"
    state: "present"

Now both Linux and Ansible give you full privileges.

SSH keys

In general, SSH keys should have been fetched from GitHub. Nothing to do now! However, I would just like to add that if you want to update ssh keys, please refer to the other documentation - even if it relates to this.

Afterwards

The new user can access the server through ssh svsticky.nl or ssh dev.svsticky.nl, for production and staging respectively. On production, the user is prompted to reset his password on first login.