Propellor comes with a lot of properties you can use. But eventually, you'll want to write a property of your own.

This isn't hard. Often propellor has some properties you can use to build the property you want. Need to modify the content of a file? Use any of the properties in Propellor.Property.File Need to run some commands? Use Propellor.Property.Cmd.

To combine properties, the easiest way is to use requires.

someproperty `requires` otherproperty

Propellor.Property.List has a propertyList combinator that's also useful.

Propellor.Property has some other functions to modify Properties in useful ways. For example, check makes a Property call an IO Bool to check if the Property needs be run.

example: User.hasLoginShell

As far as I can tell there is no easy way to set a user's login shell. A Property User.hasLoginShell, which ensures that a user has a specified login shell and that said shell is in /etc/shells would be really helpful. Sadly, I lack the skills to put this together myself -- weinzwang

Propellor makes it very easy to put together a property like this.

Let's start with a property that combines the two properties you mentioned:

hasLoginShell :: UserName -> FilePath -> Property UnixLike
hasLoginShell user shell = shellSetTo user shell `requires` shellEnabled shell

The shellEnabled property can be easily written using propellor's file manipulation properties.

-- Need to add an import to the top of the source file.
import qualified Propellor.Property.File as File

shellEnabled :: FilePath -> Property UnixLike
shellEnabled shell = "/etc/shells" `File.containsLine` shell

And then, we want to actually change the user's shell. The chsh(1) program can do that, so we can simply tell propellor the command line to run:

shellSetTo :: UserName -> FilePath -> Property UnixLike
shellSetTo user shell = cmdProperty "chsh" ["--shell", shell, user]

The only remaining problem with this is that shellSetTo runs chsh every time, and propellor will always display that it's made a change each time it runs, even when it didn't really do much. Now, there's an easy way to avoid that problem, we could just tell propellor to assume that chsh has not made a change:

shellSetTo :: UserName -> FilePath -> Property UnixLike
shellSetTo user shell = cmdProperty "chsh" ["--shell", shell, user]
    `assume` NoChange

But, it's not much harder to do this right. Let's make the property check if the user's shell is already set to the desired value and avoid doing anything in that case.

shellSetTo :: UserName -> FilePath -> Property UnixLike
shellSetTo user shell = check needchangeshell $
    cmdProperty "chsh" ["--shell", shell, user]
  where
    needchangeshell = do
        currshell <- userShell <$> getUserEntryForName user
        return (currshell /= shell)

And that will probably all work, although I've not tested it. You might want to throw in some uses of describe to give the new properties more useful descriptions.

I hope this has been helpful as an explanation of how to add properties to Propellor, and if you get these properties to work, a patch adding them to Propellor.User would be happily merged.