Remove a user and its home directory with chef-cookbook

This will be another example for #Opscode  #Chef. We will just extend the cookbook in the previous post to add a new recipe; we will add some extra lines to attributes file and write new simple recipe.

Let's start with attributes file. To remove a user, required attribute is its name. Let's provide it:

default['ruser']['name'] = "username"

We will add an attribute which will specify whether to remove or keep home directory of removed user. Perhaps, it will be kept in the archive. Therefore, as default I set it false.

default['ruser']['removehome'] = false

As final part, let's write our short recipe to perform this action.  Create a new file with a related name 'removeuser.rb'. We will write the codes in this file. Our first lines will remove a user in a system:

user node['ruser']['name'] do
        action :remove
end

Let's pass to delete home directory part. The code is in an if clause to control this action as we mentioned above:

if node['ruser']['removehome']
        directory "/home/"+node['ruser']['name'] do
                recursive true
                action :delete
        end
end

I assume that home directory of a user is at /home/username directory. If this is not suitable for your case, it will not be hard for you to change directory name.