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User management à la Lino

This document explains to developers and server administrators how to get started with Lino’s user management system. See users : user management for detailed developer documentation. See The users plugin for end-user documentation.

This document contains code snippets (lines starting with >>>) that get tested as part of our development workflow.

>>> from lino import startup
>>> startup('lino_book.projects.min1.settings')
>>> from lino.api.doctest import *
>>> from atelier.sheller import Sheller
>>> shell = Sheller("lino_book/projects/min1")

Creating a site manager

A site manager is any site user having a User.user_type.role that inherits from lino.core.roles.SiteAdmin.

The most Linoish way to create a site manager and a set of demo users is to run pm prep. This will reset the database to a virgin state and then load the demo fixture, which will create the demo users Robin, Rolf, Romain, Rando, Rik, Ronaldo … depending on your site’s language distribution (lino.core.site.Site.languages).

Once you have a site manager, you can sign in via the web interface and work as described in The users plugin.

Managing users from the command line

Django has a django-admin command named createsuperuser but this is quite limited. Lino gives a more useful command passwd.

passwd

Update or optionally create password, name and type of a user. The default action displays and optionally edits the user. Specify -c to create a new user.

Usage: go to your project directory and say:

$ python manage.py passwd [options] USERNAME

Where USERNAME is the username of the user to process. Default value for USERNAME is your system username.

Options

-c, --create

Create the given user. Fail if that username exists already.

--batch

Run in batch mode, i.e. without asking any questions. Assume yes to all questions.

>>> shell("python manage.py show users.AllUsers")
... 
========== ===================== ============ ===========
 Username   User type             First name   Last name
---------- --------------------- ------------ -----------
 robin      900 (Administrator)   Robin        Rood
 rolf       900 (Administrator)   Rolf         Rompen
 romain     900 (Administrator)   Romain       Raffault
========== ===================== ============ ===========

>>> shell("python manage.py passwd -c test --batch")
Creating new user
User test has been saved.

>>> shell("python manage.py show users.AllUsers")
... 
========== ===================== ============ ===========
 Username   User type             First name   Last name
---------- --------------------- ------------ -----------
 robin      900 (Administrator)   Robin        Rood
 rolf       900 (Administrator)   Rolf         Rompen
 romain     900 (Administrator)   Romain       Raffault
 test
========== ===================== ============ ===========

>>> u = users.User.objects.get(username="test")
>>> u.has_usable_password()
False

Managing users programmatically

For more fancy situations you can write a Python script and run it with pm run. For example:

from lino.api.shell import users
obj = users.User(username="root")
obj.set_password("1234!")
obj.full_clean()
obj.save()

Passwords of new users

The password field of a newly created user is empty, and the account therefore cannot be used to sign in. When you created a new user manually using the web interface, you must click their ChangePassword action and set their password.

>>> u = users.User(username="test")
>>> u.full_clean()
>>> u.save()

Since we didn’t set a password, Django stores a “non usable” password, and the User.check_password() method returns False:

>>> u.password  
'!...'
>>> u.check_password('')
False

>>> u.has_usable_password()
False

When setting the password for a newly created user, leave the field Current password empty.

>>> ses = rt.login('robin')
>>> values = dict(current="", new1="1234", new2="1234")
>>> rv = ses.run(u.change_password, action_param_values=values)
>>> print(rv['message'])
New password has been set for test.

>>> u.delete()