lxpasswd

lxpasswd is a utility for creating users inside a chroot.

It can be run without having to have the LXC container running or have the standard Linux utilities available.

You dont have to have any files in the container yet.

lxpasswd appends to ./etc/passwd, ./etc/group, and ./etc/shadow.

N.B. not using absolute paths /etc/....

Example:

cd /var/lib/lxc/mycontainer/rootfs

lxpasswd 0 root
lxpasswd 1000 bob   '$whatEvA'
lxpasswd 1001 alice '0hhhArrh'

The first arguments is the userid and the groupid, the second argument is the username, the third argument is a plain text password. If password is ommitted lxpasswd puts * in etc/shadow indicating that this user can not login with a password, (common for root user).

To create passwords when inside a chroot or virtual machine cd to / first.

cd /
lxpasswd 1000 bob '$whatEvA'

lxpasswd is linked statically so you don't need to have /lib mounted yet.

rootfs=/var/lib/lxc/mycontainer/rootfs
cp /bin/lxpasswd $rootfs/bin

chroot $rootfs /bin/lxpasswd 1000 bob '$whatEvA'

This creates the minimal entries for login

etc/group
  bob:x:1000:bob

etc/passwd
  bob:x:1000:1000:bob:/home/bob:/bin/sh

etc/shadow
  bob:$6$PnMNUaj$Dt.jgDm1fSgfiznupMlZsY7m6iqcS9URPNQoWzkt2OszC0G2KoidhYdSxdgKkdpeOElb8t8meeU7gyGnxbrnH1:1986:0:99999:7:::

N.B. lwpasswd currently does no validation that the arguments provided are sane: if you run it when a given UID exists you will create duplicate entries.