Creating users from data bags

When managing a set of servers, it's important to make sure that the right people (and only them) have access. You don't want a shared account whose password is known by everyone. You don't want to hardcode any users into your recipes either, because you want to separate logic and data.

Chef helps you to manage users on your nodes using data bags for your users and allow a recipe to create and remove users, accordingly.

Let's look at how you can do that.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a cookbook named my_cookbook and that the run_list of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in the Creating and using cookbooks section in Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure.

Create a Berksfile in your Chef repository that includes my_cookbook:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
source 'https://supermarket.chef.io'

cookbook 'my_cookbook', path: './cookbooks/my_cookbook'

Make sure that you have a public SSH key available for your user by following the instructions at...