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uzers-rs

Adoption and continuation of the unmaintained ogham/rust-users crate. Big shout-out to its creator Benjamin Sago.

This is a library for accessing Unix users and groups. It supports getting the system users and groups, storing them in a cache, and creating your own mock tables.

Installation

This crate works with Cargo. Add the following to your Cargo.toml dependencies section:

[dependencies]
uzers = "0.12"

Usage

In Unix, each user has an individual user ID, and each process has an effective user ID that says which user’s permissions it is using. Furthermore, users can be the members of groups, which also have names and IDs. This functionality is exposed in libc, the C standard library, but as an unsafe Rust interface. This wrapper library provides a safe interface, using User and Group types and functions such as get_user_by_id instead of low-level pointers and strings. It also offers basic caching functionality.

It does not (yet) offer editing functionality; the values returned are read-only.

Users

The function get_current_uid returns a uid_t value representing the user currently running the program, and the get_user_by_uid function scans the users database and returns a User with the user’s information. This function returns None when there is no user for that ID.

A User has the following accessors:

  • uid: The user’s ID
  • name: The user’s name
  • primary_group: The ID of this user’s primary group

Here is a complete example that prints out the current user’s name:

use uzers::{get_user_by_uid, get_current_uid};

let user = get_user_by_uid(get_current_uid()).unwrap();
println!("Hello, {}!", user.name());

This code assumes (with unwrap()) that the user hasn’t been deleted after the program has started running. For arbitrary user IDs, this is not a safe assumption: it’s possible to delete a user while it’s running a program, or is the owner of files, or for that user to have never existed. So always check the return values!

There is also a get_current_username function, as it’s such a common operation that it deserves special treatment.

Caching

Despite the above warning, the users and groups database rarely changes. While a short program may only need to get user information once, a long-running one may need to re-query the database many times, and a medium-length one may get away with caching the values to save on redundant system calls.

For this reason, this crate offers a caching interface to the database, which offers the same functionality while holding on to every result, caching the information so it can be re-used.

To introduce a cache, create a new UsersCache and call the same methods on it. For example:

use uzers::{Users, Groups, UsersCache};

let mut cache = UsersCache::new();
let uid = cache.get_current_uid();
let user = cache.get_user_by_uid(uid).unwrap();
println!("Hello again, {}!", user.name());

This cache is only additive: it’s not possible to drop it, or erase selected entries, as when the database may have been modified, it’s best to start entirely afresh. So to accomplish this, just start using a new UsersCache.

Groups

Finally, it’s possible to get groups in a similar manner. A Group has the following accessors:

  • gid: The group’s ID
  • name: The group’s name

And again, a complete example:

use uzers::{Users, Groups, UsersCache};

let mut cache = UsersCache::new();
let group = cache.get_group_by_name("admin").expect("No such group 'admin'!");
println!("The '{}' group has the ID {}", group.name(), group.gid());

Logging

The logging feature, which is on by default, uses the log crate to record all interactions with the operating system at Trace log level.

Caveats

You should be prepared for the users and groups tables to be completely broken: IDs shouldn’t be assumed to map to actual users and groups, and usernames and group names aren’t guaranteed to map either!

Mockable users and groups

When you’re testing your code, you don’t want to actually rely on the system actually having various users and groups present - it’s much better to have a custom set of users that are guaranteed to be there, so you can test against them.

The mock module allows you to create these custom users and groups definitions, then access them using the same Users trait as in the main library, with few changes to your code.

Creating mock users

The only thing a mock users table needs to know in advance is the UID of the current user. Aside from that, you can add users and groups with add_user and add_group to the table:

use std::sync::Arc;
use uzers::mock::{MockUsers, User, Group};
use uzers::os::unix::{UserExt, GroupExt};

let mut users = MockUsers::with_current_uid(1000);
let bobbins = User::new(1000, "Bobbins", 1000).with_home_dir("/home/bobbins");
users.add_user(bobbins);
users.add_group(Group::new(100, "funkyppl"));

The exports get re-exported into the mock module, for simpler use lines.

Using mock users

To set your program up to use either type of Users table, make your functions and structs accept a generic parameter that implements the Users trait. Then, you can pass in a value of either OS or Mock type.

Here’s a complete example:

use std::sync::Arc;
use uzers::{Users, UsersCache, User};
use uzers::os::unix::UserExt;
use uzers::mock::MockUsers;

fn print_current_username<U: Users>(users: &mut U) {
    println!("Current user: {:?}", users.get_current_username());
}

let mut users = MockUsers::with_current_uid(1001);
users.add_user(User::new(1001, "fred", 101));
print_current_username(&mut users);

let mut actual_users = UsersCache::new();
print_current_username(&mut actual_users);