How To Manage Users and Groups

Sharing files and data with other users is a core feature in Aleph. This guide describes how to manage users and user groups in Aleph.

Many organizations delegate user management to a seperate identity provider, and we recommend that you do so, too! Aleph supports the OAuth2/OpenID Connect standards and works with a wide range of identity providers. Please refer to “How To Configure an Identity Provider” for details.

For this reason, we do not provide user interfaces for user and groups management and do not plan to implement this in the future. However, the Aleph CLI supports a limited set of commands for user and group management.

Prerequisites

The Aleph CLI is available in Aleph containers. If you have deployed Aleph using Docker Compose, start a shell session in an Aleph container:

docker compose run --rm shell bash

Manage users

List users

Run the following CLI command to print a list of all users, including the groups each user belongs to:

aleph users

Create or update a user

Run the follwoing CLI command (replacing the placeholder values) to create a new user. If a user with the given email address exits already, it will be updated.

aleph createuser --name "John Doe" --password "SECURE_PASSWORD" john.doe@example.org

You can optionally pass the --admin flag to create an admin user:

aleph createuser --name "John Doe" --admin --password "SECURE_PASSWORD" john.doe@example.org

Reset a password

Aleph doesn’t have a self-service password reset for users. However, you can update a user’s password using the CLI as outlined in the section above.

Delete a user

aleph

Manage groups

Users can belong to one or more user groups. User groups make it easier to manage access, especially when you’re collaborating with many users. You

List groups

Run the following CLI command to list all groups:

aleph groups

Create a group

Run the following CLI command to create a user group. Replace “staff” with the name of your group.

aleph creategroup staff

Add a user to a group

Run the following command to add a user to a group. Replace john.doe@example.org with the user’s email address and “staff” with the name of the group.

aleph useradd john.doe@example.org staff

Remove a user from a group

Run the following command to remove a user from a group. Replace john.doe@example.org with the user’s email address and “staff” with the name of the group.

aleph userdel john.doe@example.org staff