Manage users from the CLI

Create and delete Datashare users with the datashare user subcommands.

The datashare user subcommands let you provision and remove users directly from the command line, without writing SQL or Redis commands by hand:

Subcommand	Description
user create	Create a Datashare user
user delete	Delete a Datashare user and all their owned data

Run these commands with the same data-store settings as your server (--dataSourceUrl, and --redisAddress if your deployment uses Redis) so they operate on the same user inventory.

Create a user

datashare user create alice --email [e-mail]

The login can be passed as a positional argument (as above) or with --login. Useful options:

Option	Description
--email	RFC 5322 email address
--name	Display name (default: login)
--password	Password, for the local provider
--provider	local, oauth or external (default: local)
--groups	Comma-separated project names the user can access
--if-not-exists	Idempotent: exit 0 if the user already exists
--json	Emit a JSON result on stdout
--no-input	Disable interactive prompts

For example, to create a local user with a password and access to two projects:

datashare user create alice \
    --email [e-mail] \
    --password "$PW" \
    --groups project1,project2

Or to provision a user authenticated by an external identity provider (see OAuth2):

datashare user create alice --email [e-mail] --provider oauth --no-input

Prefer passing the password through an environment variable (as in the example above) rather than typing it literally, so it doesn't end up in your shell history.

With Docker Compose, prefix the command with the web container's entrypoint:

docker compose exec datashare_web /entrypoint.sh \
  user create alice \
  --email [e-mail] \
  --dataSourceUrl 'jdbc:postgresql://postgres/datashare?user=<username>&password=<password>'

Delete a user

datashare user delete alice --yes

Deleting a user removes the user and all their owned data. This cannot be undone.

Option	Description
--yes, -y	Skip the confirmation prompt
--if-exists	Idempotent: exit 0 if the user doesn't exist
--json	Emit a JSON result on stdout
--no-input	Disable interactive prompts (forces --yes)

Scripting

All user subcommands are script-friendly: combine --json (machine-readable output), --no-input (no prompts) and the idempotency flags (--if-not-exists / --if-exists) to write provisioning scripts that can safely be re-run:

datashare user create alice --email [e-mail] --if-not-exists --no-input --json

Related pages

• User management for choosing an authentication method and the user record format.

• Manage projects from the CLI for granting users a role on a project.