Create a user to run the daemon on MacOS X?

Question

What is the correct way to create a user on MacOS X from the command line that will only be used to run an application with multiple applications? For example, the user "_www" already exists for Apache httpd, but for the new application, I want him to use his own account.

Answer 1

There is no adduser command. Mac's approach is to use the dscl command, which is the "Directory Service Command Line Utility." Directory services are similar to LDAP, but this is a different solution.

The examples below will use "mydaemon" as the intended account, although you usually use a value that matches the name of your daemon application.

All daemon users have an underscore prefix, such as _www.

To list the attributes of an existing record:

sudo dscl . -read /Users/_www 

Before creating a user, create a group in which you select an unused group identifier (here we selected 300):

  sudo dscl . -create /Groups/_mydaemon sudo dscl . -create /Groups/_mydaemon PrimaryGroupID 300 

After that, we create a new user (we use the same identifier as for the group that will not use the shell:

  sudo dscl . -create /Users/_mydaemon UniqueID 300 sudo dscl . -create /Users/_mydaemon PrimaryGroupID 300 sudo dscl . -create /Users/_mydaemon UserShell /usr/bin/false 

The above is based on reading from different sources of information and checking the process yourself. One of the links I found useful is:

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Create_a_Mac_OS_X_startup_daemon

Note. There is also a version of the dscl GUI (location based on MacOS X 10.10):

/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Directory\Utility.app/