user password management in Puppet info User mcfakey Provider useradd does not support features manages passwords not managing attribute password

Question

I am are trying to manage  a users password through puppet:

class user_password {
  user { 'mcfakey':
    ensure   => 'present',
    password => '$1$9VC1vFFa$GHKWgtdODti8eKqkQ7Ruv.',
  }
}

but it displays a message as shown below:

info: /User[mcfakey]: Provider useradd does not support features manages_passwords;
  not managing attribute password

Answer 1

• Ruby language support that puppet needs to manage a users password is missing and so it requires an additional software to be installed to do the needful.

• If you're running on CentOS / Fedora this can be fixed by installing the ruby-shadowpackage, and on Debian / Ubuntu using libshadow-ruby will fulfill the requirement. 

• You generally encounter this in gem or source based installs as your package manager should handle this dependency when installing puppet via a package.

• It's worth noting that the user resource will still be added but the password will not be set to the value you chose.