This is a rather large commit that switches user/group creation from using
useradd/groupadd on activation to just generating the contents of /etc/passwd
and /etc/group, and then on activation merging the generated files with the
files that exist in the system. This makes the user activation process much
cleaner, in my opinion.
The users.extraUsers.<user>.uid and users.extraGroups.<group>.gid must all be
properly defined (if <user>.createUser is true, which it is by default). My
pull request adds a lot of uids/gids to config.ids to solve this problem for
existing nixos services, but there might be configurations that break because
this change. However, this will be discovered during the build.
Option changes introduced by this commit:
* Remove the options <user>.isSystemUser and <user>.isAlias since
they don't make sense when generating /etc/passwd statically.
* Add <group>.members as a complement to <user>.extraGroups.
* Add <user>.passwordFile for setting a user's password from an encrypted
(shadow-style) file.
* Add users.mutableUsers which is true by default. This means you can keep
managing your users as previously, by using useradd/groupadd manually. This is
accomplished by merging the generated passwd/group file with the existing files
in /etc on system activation. The merging of the files is simplistic. It just
looks at the user/group names. If a user/group exists both on the system and
in the generated files, the system entry will be kept un-changed and the
generated entries will be ignored. The merging itself is performed with the
help of vipw/vigr to properly lock the account files during edit.
If mutableUsers is set to false, the generated passwd and group files will not
be merged with the system files on activation. Instead they will simply replace
the system files, and overwrite any changes done on the running system. The
same logic holds for user password, if the <user>.password or
<user>.passwordFile options are used. If mutableUsers is false, password will
simply be replaced on activation. If true, the initial user passwords will be
set according to the configuration, but existing passwords will not be touched.
I have tested this on a couple of different systems and it seems to work fine
so far. If you think this is a good idea, please test it. This way of adding
local users has been discussed in issue #103 (and this commit solves that
issue).
Now that Java is happy with our /etc/localtime, there is no reason to
set $TZ anymore. (See 945849b86f, 279248f6c5, 1b5e860f65607b4cc7de4b6b5db95460cf144526.)
Fixes #1463.
Some programs (notably the Java Runtime Environment) expect to be able
to extract the name of the time zone from the target of the
/etc/localtime symlink. That doesn't work if /etc/localtime is a
symlink to /etc/static/localtime. So make it a direct symlink.
(systemd service descriptions that is, not service descriptions in "man
configuration.nix".)
Capitalizing each word in the description seems to be the accepted
standard.
Also shorten these descriptions:
* "Munin node, the agent process" => "Munin Node"
* "Planet Venus, an awesome ‘river of news’ feed reader" => "Planet Venus Feed Reader"
A null password allows logging into local PAM services such as "login"
(agetty) and KDM. That's not actually a security problem for EC2
machines, since they do not have "local" logins; for VirtualBox
machines, if you local access, you can do anything anyway. But it's
better to be on the safe side and disable password-based logins for
root.
E.g.
The unique option `fileSystems./.device' is defined multiple times, in `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix' and `/etc/nixos/foo.nix'.
This requires passing file/value tuples to the merge functions.
For instance, if time.timeZone is defined multiple times, you now get
the error message:
error: user-thrown exception: The unique option `time.timeZone' is defined multiple times, in `/etc/nixos/configurations/misc/eelco/x11vnc.nix' and `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix'.
while previously you got:
error: user-thrown exception: Multiple definitions of string. Only one is allowed for this option.
and only an inspection of the stack trace gave a clue as to what
option caused the problem.
The major changes are:
* The evaluation is now driven by the declared options. In
particular, this fixes the long-standing problem with lack of
laziness of disabled option definitions. Thus, a configuration like
config = mkIf false {
environment.systemPackages = throw "bla";
};
will now evaluate without throwing an error. This also improves
performance since we're not evaluating unused option definitions.
* The implementation of properties is greatly simplified.
* There is a new type constructor "submodule" that replaces
"optionSet". Unlike "optionSet", "submodule" gets its option
declarations as an argument, making it more like "listOf" and other
type constructors. A typical use is:
foo = mkOption {
type = type.attrsOf (type.submodule (
{ config, ... }:
{ bar = mkOption { ... };
xyzzy = mkOption { ... };
}));
};
Existing uses of "optionSet" are automatically mapped to
"submodule".
* Modules are now checked for unsupported attributes: you get an error
if a module contains an attribute other than "config", "options" or
"imports".
* The new implementation is faster and uses much less memory.
