Add Users

Under construction

We are still working on the user creation and integration processes. This guide outlines a few currently working solutions.

This is inspiration

Our community might come up with better solutions soon. We are seeking contributions to improve this pattern, so please contact us if you have a nicer solution in mind!

Summary🔗

The users we define in this step will be the users that can actually log in to your previously created machines. You can define which user has access to which machine in detail, but in this example all users can log into all machines.

Defining users can be done in many different ways. We will highlight a few approaches here and recommend using clan's users service.

Requirements🔗

• Estimated time: 30min
• A working clan setup with at least one machine

Adding Users using the users service🔗

To add a first user this guide will be leveraging two things:

• services: Allows to bind arbitrary logic to something we call an ìnstance.
• services/users: Implements logic for adding a single user.

The example shows how to add a user called jon:

clan.nix{
    inventory.machines = {
        jon = { };
        sara = { };
    };
    inventory.instances = {
        jon-user = { # (1)
            module.name = "users";

            roles.default.tags.all = { }; # (2)

            roles.default.settings = {
                user = "jon"; # (3)
                groups = [
                    "wheel" # Allow using 'sudo'
                    "networkmanager" # Allows to manage network connections.
                    "video" # Allows to access video devices.
                    "input" # Allows to access input devices.
                ];
            };
        };
    };
}

1. Add user = jon as a user on all machines. Will create a home directory, and prompt for a password before deployment.
2. Add this user to all machines
3. Define the name of the user to be jon

The users service:

• creates a /home/jon directory.
• allows jon to sign in.
• takes care of the user's password.

For more information see services/users

Alternative 1: Using a custom approach🔗

Some people like to define a users folder in their repository root. That allows to bind all user specific logic to a single place (default.nix) Which can be imported into individual machines to make the user available on that machine.

.
├── machines
│   ├── jon
# ......
├── users
│   ├── jon
│   │   └── default.nix # <- a NixOS module; sets some options
# ... ... ...

Alternative 2: Using home-manager🔗

When using clan's users service, it is possible to define extraModules. In fact this is always possible when using clan's services.

We can use this property of clan services to bind a nixosModule to the user, which configures home-manager.

clan.nix{
    inventory.machines = {
        jon = { };
        sara = { };
    };
    inventory.instances = {
        jon-user = {
            module.name = "users";

            roles.default.tags.all = { };

            roles.default.settings = {
                user = "jon",
                groups = [
                    "wheel"
                    "networkmanager"
                    "video"
                    "input"
                ];
            };

            roles.default.extraModules = [ ./users/jon/home.nix ]; # (1)
        };
    };
}

1. Type path or string: Must point to a separate file. Inlining a module is not possible

users/jon/home.nix# NixOS module to import home-manager and the home-manager configuration of 'jon'
{ self, ...}:
{
  imports = [ self.inputs.home-manager.nixosModules.default ];
  home-manager.users.jon = {
    imports = [
      ./home-configuration.nix
    ];
  };
}

Checkpoint🔗

Under construction

The user creation process is not yet finieshed, but if you want to test if everything worked up to this point, you can use clan machines update. If the command does not return any errors and asks you to select a password, you can ctrl-c out of it at this point.

Up Next🔗

In the next step, we will add a few recommended services to your clan setup.