Run adduser non-interactively

Question

I'd like to use the adduser command to add a user (with disabled password) via a shell script.

By default, adduser prompts you for various values (e.g., Full Name). Is there any way to submit these values via command line? Or will I need to useradd instead?

Answer 1

Use the --gecos option to skip the chfn interactive part.

adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" username

It's all in the man page. Not the most obvious formulation tho.

--gecos GECOS
          Set  the  gecos field for the new entry generated.  adduser will
          not ask for finger information if this option is given.

The GECOS field is a comma separated list as such: Full name,Room number,Work phone,Home phone, despite that man page mentions finger information Details - Wikipedia

Hope this helps you.

Update: for more recent (or upcoming) versions of adduser, the --gecos option is replaced by --comment.

--comment comment
      Set the comment field for the new entry generated.  adduser will
      not ask for the information if this option is given.  This field
      is  also  known under the name GECOS field and contains informa‐
      tion that is used by the finger command.  This used  to  be  the
      --gecos  option,  which  is deprecated and will be removed after
      Debian bookworm.  Valid Modes: adduser, adduser --system.

Answer 2

useradd can also add users and does not appear to have any form of prompting built in.

useradd -m -p <encryptedPassword> -s /bin/bash <user>

• -m, --create-home: Create user home directory
• -p, --password: Specify user password; skip to have it disabled

• -s, --shell: Default shell for logon user

  Blank will use default login shell specified by the SHELL variable in /etc/default/useradd

• Substitute <user> with the login name
• Substitute <encryptedPassword> with the encrypted password

---

Generating a hashed password:

There are a lot of crypt3 implementations that can generate a hashed password. The whole thing is your hashed password.

Sha-512 Based

The resulting output format: the hash mechanism ($6 for sha-512), the random salt (the eight bytes after the second dollar sign $ASDF1234), remainder is the payload.

• mkpasswd mkpasswd -m sha-512

  (mkpasswd is provided by the whois package)

DES based:

The resulting output format: first 2 bytes is your salt, remainder is the payload. The whole thing is your hashed password.

• mkpasswd: mkpasswd (provided by whois package)
• openssl: openssl passwd -crypt
• perl: perl -e "print crypt('password');"
• python: python3 -c 'import crypt; print(crypt.crypt("password"))'

Answer 3

You can combine what @ThorSummoner @Zoke are saying like so:

username=jovyan
password=jovyan
adduser --gecos "" --disabled-password $username
chpasswd <<<"$username:$password"

I'm doing this for my Jupyter docker-stack. It allows full headless setup in a Dockerfile.