LDAP user cleanup

LDAP User Cleanup is a new feature in the LDAP user and group backend application. LDAP User Cleanup is a background process that automatically searches the Nextcloud LDAP mappings table, and verifies if the LDAP users are still available. Any users that are not available are marked as deleted in the oc_preferences database table. Then you can run a command to display this table, displaying only the users marked as deleted, and then you have the option of removing their data from your Nextcloud data directory.

These items are removed upon cleanup:

  • Local Nextcloud group assignments

  • User preferences (DB table oc_preferences)

  • User’s Nextcloud home folder

  • User’s corresponding entry in oc_storages

There are two prerequisites for LDAP User Cleanup to operate:

  1. Set ldapUserCleanupInterval in config.php to your desired check interval in minutes. The default is 51 minutes.

  2. All configured LDAP connections are enabled and operating correctly. As users can exist on multiple LDAP servers, you want to be sure that all of your LDAP servers are available so that a user on a temporarily disconnected LDAP server is not marked as deleted.

The background process examines 50 users at a time, and runs at the interval you configured with ldapUserCleanupInterval. For example, if you have 200 LDAP users and your ldapUserCleanupInterval is 20 minutes, the process will examine the first 50 users, then 20 minutes later the next 50 users, and 20 minutes later the next 50, and so on.

The amount of users to check can be set to a custom value via occ command. The following example sets it to 300:

sudo -u www-data php occ config:app:set --value=300 user_ldap cleanUpJobChunkSize

There are two occ commands to use for examining a table of users marked as deleted, and then manually deleting them. The occ command is in your Nextcloud directory, for example /var/www/nextcloud/occ, and it must be run as your HTTP user. To learn more about occ, see Using the occ command.

These examples are for Ubuntu Linux:

  1. sudo -u www-data php occ ldap:show-remnants displays a table with all users that have been marked as deleted, and their LDAP data.

  2. sudo -u www-data php occ user:delete [user] removes the user’s data from the Nextcloud data directory.

This example shows what the table of users marked as deleted looks like:

$ sudo -u www-data php occ ldap:show-remnants
+-----------------+-----------------+------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Nextcloud name  | Display Name    | LDAP UID         | LDAP DN                              |
+-----------------+-----------------+------------------+--------------------------------------+
| aaliyah_brown   | aaliyah brown   | aaliyah_brown    | uid=aaliyah_brown,ou=people,dc=com   |
| aaliyah_hammes  | aaliyah hammes  | aaliyah_hammes   | uid=aaliyah_hammes,ou=people,dc=com  |
| aaliyah_johnston| aaliyah johnston| aaliyah_johnston | uid=aaliyah_johnston,ou=people,dc=com|
| aaliyah_kunze   | aaliyah kunze   | aaliyah_kunze    | uid=aaliyah_kunze,ou=people,dc=com   |
+-----------------+-----------------+------------------+--------------------------------------+

Following flags can be specified additionally:

–short-date: formats the dates for Last login and Detected on in a short Y-m-d format (e.g. 2019-01-14)

–json–: instead of a table, the output is json-encoded. This makes it easy to process the data programmatically.

Then you can run sudo -u www-data php occ user:delete aaliyah_brown to delete user aaliyah_brown. You must use the user’s Nextcloud name.

Deleting local Nextcloud users

You may also use occ user:delete [user] to remove a local Nextcloud user; this removes their user account and their data.