Change / Edit Username

Discuss
1

What type of hardware are you using: VPS bought online
What YunoHost version are you running: 12.0.12
How are you able to access your server: SSH
Are you in a special context or did you perform specific tweaking on your YunoHost instance ?: no

Describe your issue

I’m in the rare situation where one user has changed their actual first name. Of course, changing the email address, etc. is easy, but I would like to give them the opportunity to change their username as well.

I did some research and found out that Yunohost usernames cannot be changed by design and are also Linux system usernames.
After some thought, I came up with this strategy:

  • create new user in ynh
  • grant the same rights
  • delete mail aliases in old account, add them in new
  • stop postfix, dovecot and nginx (just ot be save)
  • cp and chown /home/USER directory
  • cp and chown /var/mail/USER directory
  • transfer data for apps
  • in the end: delete old account

I did a test run and at the first glance things seem to work. The biggest problem might be apps that have their own data structure (transfer data for apps).
In our case it is not many and some have no LDAP anyways (Mattermost, Vaultwarden).
Biggest issue might be Nextcloud. I didn’t yet dive into possibilities of transferring Shares (e.g. calendars), shared links, etc. Before I wanted to check, if there are general problems, I don’t see

So my question is: is there anyone out there who has done something similar? Have I overlooked something that could lead to nasty problems? Does anyone have experience of transferring an LDAP account to another in Nextcloud?

Thx in advance!

2

hello,
I don’t remind if I’ve already done that action, but here is how I’ll do that if I’ll have to :

  • Create a new user with the webadmin.
  • give access to this new user to the apps you want.
  • copy each data as you did (don’t forget this one : /home/yunohost.app/nextcloud/data)
  • you may probably scan files to find all after cp :
sudo -u apache php /var/www/html/nextcloud/occ files:scan // perhaps you'll have to adapt this line (php version, ...)

There is this command in the nextcloud documentation, I don’t know it but that seems to do exactly what you want : Using the occ command — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation

  • test your new user,
  • When all is fine, delete the old.