Users and Groups

If your ebuild requires a user or group to be added for a daemon, for example, this should be performed via the functions available in eutils.eclass. Regardless of whether you are adding a group or a user, this should be performed in the pkg_setup function and not somewhere else: pkg_setup is sandbox-safe, is called before the compile process so a build that requires the user to exist will have it, and is also called for both binary and source packages.

Adding Groups

To add a group, use the enewgroup function:

enewgroup <name> [uid]

By default the next available group ID is selected. To set a specfic group ID, pass it an extra argument to enewgroup.

Group IDs should rarely be hardcoded. If this is the case, you should probably check first on gentoo-dev.

Adding Users

To add a user, use the enewuser function:

enewuser <user> [uid] [shell] [homedir] [groups] [params]

By default, both enewuser and enewgroup allocate the next available user ID or group ID to the new user or group - if not, you explicitly have to specify one.

Arguments for enewuser must be passed in the order as shown above: if you do not want to specify a fixed user ID however but do want to set a specific shell, for example, use -1 for the uid parameter. The same applies for any other parameter where you want to keep the default setting.

Groups for the groups argument should be separated by a comma (,) and wrapped correctly, for example:

enewuser frozd -1 -1 -1 "backup,frozd"

Finally, any data left over for the params argument is passed directly to useradd.

User IDs should rarely be hardcoded. If this is the case, you should probably check first on gentoo-dev.