user_admin.md

User administration in Mercury

Mercury uses a SQLite DB for user info (denoted as USER_DB) that is separate from the main corpus DB CORPUS_DB. By decoupling the user administration from the corpus, we can have a single user DB for multiple corpora and the annotation is always de-anonymized. The Default names for the user DB is users.sqlite.

In a Mercury USER_DB, the following fields are stored for each user:

• user_id: Hash string that uniquely identifies a user
• user_name: User's name (for display purpose only, not for login)
• email: User's email (for login)
• hashed_password: Hashed password (for login)

The script for user administration is user_admin.py.

Actions that can be performed:

• Creating a new user

  There are two ways to create a new user:

  1. Using interactive mode:

     python user_admin.py new

     then follow the prompts.

  2. Using command line arguments:

     python user_admin.py new -n <user_name> -e <email> -p <password>

     For example, to create a user with name Test User, email test@example.com and a random password:

     python user_admin.py new -n "Test User" -e "test@example.com" 

• Listing all users

  python user_admin.py list

• Changing the password or email of a user, including resetting password

  There are two ways to update a user's info:

  1. Using interactive mode:

     python user_admin.py update

     then follow the prompts.

  2. Using command line arguments:

     python user_admin.py update -k <field_to_locate_user> -v <value_to_locate_user> -f <field_to_update> -n <new_value_of_the_field>

     For example, to change the password of a user with email test@example.com to abcdefg:

     python user_admin.py update -k email -v test@example.com -f password -n abcdefg

For various reasons, Mercury does not support deleting users. However, you can simply change the password of a user to a random string to effectively disable the user.

Mercury has minimal exception handling for user administration.