YaST - The Users Management Module

This module allows to use YaST to manage local and LDAP users and groups. It also makes possible to configure some aspects of the system related to user management and authentication. For a partial description of what this module can do, check the use-cases document. For an overview on how all the authentication-related YaST modules fit together, check doc/auth-modules.md.

Many components of the module were written in the Perl programming language a long time ago. Although those components still work, they follow approaches that are not longer considered to be appropriate. For example, they manage important files like /etc/passwd or home directories on their own, instead of delegating those tasks to the tools included in the operating system like those contained in the shadow package. The functionality and internal structure of those legacy components is described at doc/users.html. Although that document is outdated in some areas, it's still useful to understand how the module works in general and to have some extra overview about the use-cases it covers (in addition to those described in the document mentioned above).

The module is currently being rewritten in Ruby in an attempt to make it more maintainable and better integrated with other components of the system. This is still a work in progress and both the old Perl components and the new Ruby ones (grouped on the namespace Y2Users) are usually involved in every operation. Apart from the mentioned documents, the doc directory contains several files describing how both the old Perl and the new Ruby components work and the correspondences between them.

Development

You need to prepare your environment with:

ruby_version=$(ruby -e "puts RbConfig::CONFIG['ruby_version']")
zypper install -C "rubygem(ruby:$ruby_version:yast-rake)"
zypper install -C "rubygem(ruby:$ruby_version:rspec)"
zypper install git yast2-devtools yast2-testsuite cracklib perl-Digest-SHA1 perl-X500-DN perl-gettext yast2-security yast2-perl-bindings yast2-ldap yast2-pam

You can then run the auth-server module with:

rake run
rake run[module name]

Tests

rake test:unit

Logs

If you are running as a non-root user, the logs are located in:

~/.y2log

If you are running as root, these logs are in:

/var/log/YaST2/y2log

For more detailed logging, you are able to execute YaST with debugging environment variables:

Y2DEBUG=1 rake run[module name]