# How can I manage user properties in several groups

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/how-can-i-manage-user-properties-in-several-groups/31243>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [September 9, 2019, 4:35pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/how-can-i-manage-user-properties-in-several-groups/31243 "2019-09-09T16:35:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Bram\_Mertens](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a698b9/32.png) [@Bram\_Mertens](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Bram_Mertens)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2019, 4:35pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/how-can-i-manage-user-properties-in-several-groups/31243/1 "2019-09-09T16:35:43Z")

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Hi,

I’m trying to manage user accounts for a small company without central authentication system.

The goal is to:

- define default user properties centrally
- override specific properties on more specific levels like groups

More specifically I want to define the UID, home dir etc. centrally but define which users are able to log in based on the group a server belongs to.

Up until now I created a \_users variable in my “common” role and added tasks for a specific project as needed.  
This approach obviously doesn’t scale well and if a user is working on more than one project the user details still need to be duplicated.

I tried group\_vars/all and group\_vars/project but that overrides rather than appends to the list of users. (Similar to the singleplatform-eng/ansible-users role).

Perhaps tags in combination with when? could be used but I haven’t figured out how to do this and feel like this must be a more common request and I’m simply using the wrong keywords.

TIA

Bram