Managing Users in an esusers Realmedit
The esusers command line tool is located in ES_HOME/bin/shield and enables several
administrative tasks for managing users:
Adding Usersedit
The esusers useradd command adds a user to your cluster.
To ensure that Elasticsearch can read the user and role information at startup, run esusers useradd as the
same user you use to run Elasticsearch. Running the command as root or some other user will update the permissions
for the users and users_roles files and prevent Elasticsearch from accessing them.
esusers useradd <username>
A username must be at least 1 character and no longer than 30 characters. The first character must be a letter
(a-z or A-Z) or an underscore (_). Subsequent characters can be letters, underscores (_), digits (0-9), or any
of the following symbols @, -, . or $
You can specify the user’s password at the command line with the -p option. When this option is absent, the
esusers command prompts you for the password. Omit the -p option to keep plaintext passwords out of the terminal
session’s command history.
esusers useradd <username> -p <secret>
Passwords must be at least 6 characters long.
You can define a user’s roles with the -r parameter. This parameter accepts a comma-separated list of role names to
associate with the user.
esusers useradd <username> -r <comma-separated list of role names>
The following example adds a new user named jacknich to the esusers realm. The password for this user is
theshining, and this user is associated with the logstash and marvel roles.
esusers useradd jacknich -p theshining -r logstash,marvel
For valid role names please see Role Definitions.
Listing Usersedit
The esusers list command lists the users registered in the esusers realm, as in the following example:
esusers list rdeniro : admin alpacino : power_user jacknich : marvel,logstash
Users are in the left-hand column and their corresponding roles are listed in the right-hand column.
The esusers list <username> command lists a specific user. Use this command to verify that a user has been
successfully added to the cluster.
esusers list jacknich jacknich : marvel,logstash
Managing User Passwordsedit
The esusers passwd command enables you to reset a user’s password. You can specify the new password directly with the
-p option. When -p option is omitted, the tool will prompt you to enter and confirm a password in interactive mode.
esusers passwd <username>
esusers passwd <username> -p <password>
Assigning Users to Rolesedit
The esusers roles command manages the roles associated to a particular user. The -a option adds a comma-separated
list of roles to a user. The -r option removes a comma-separated list of roles from a user. You can combine adding and
removing roles within the same command to change a user’s roles.
esusers roles <username> -a <commma-separate list of roles> -r <commma-separate list of roles>
The following command removes the logstash and marvel roles from user jacknich, as well as adding the user role:
esusers roles jacknich -r logstash,marvel -a user
Listing the user displays the new role assignment:
esusers list jacknich jacknich : user
Deleting Usersedit
The esusers userdel command deletes a user.
userdel <username>
About esusersedit
The esusers tool manipulates two files, users and users_roles, in CONFIG_DIR/shield/. These two files store all user data for the esusers realm and are read by Shield
on startup.
By default, Shield checks these files for changes every 5 seconds. You can change this default behavior by changing the
value of the watcher.interval.high setting in the elasticsearch.yml file.
These files are managed locally by the node and are not managed globally by the cluster. This means that with a typical multi-node cluster, the exact same changes need to be applied on each and every node in the cluster.
A safer approach would be to apply the change on one of the nodes and have the
users and users_roles files distributed/copied to all other nodes in the
cluster (either manually or using a configuration management system such as
Puppet or Chef).
While it is possible to modify these files directly using any standard text
editor, we strongly recommend using the esusers command-line tool to apply
the required changes.
The users Fileedit
The users file stores all the users and their passwords. Each line in the users file represents a single user entry
consisting of the username and hashed password.
rdeniro:$2a$10$BBJ/ILiyJ1eBTYoRKxkqbuDEdYECplvxnqQ47uiowE7yGqvCEgj9W alpacino:$2a$10$cNwHnElYiMYZ/T3K4PvzGeJ1KbpXZp2PfoQD.gfaVdImnHOwIuBKS jacknich:$2a$10$GYUNWyABV/Ols/.bcwxuBuuaQzV6WIauW6RdboojxcixBq3LtI3ni
The esusers command-line tool uses bcrypt to hash the password by default.
The users_roles Fileedit
The users_roles file stores the roles associated with the users, as in the following example:
admin:rdeniro power_user:alpacino,jacknich user:jacknich
Each row maps a role to a comma-separated list of all the users that are associated with that role.