Recently a pfSense FauxAPI request came in as an issue on Github that I wrote example code to address because the use case sounded like a a common enough request - Github user @Jgerardopine spoke of wanting a programmatic method for creating (and managing) user accounts in pfSense and was looking to pfsense_fauxapi to address that requirement. The example code can be found in the examples section of the repo.


From the Github issue response

This sounded like a common enough use-case that I created some example code that implements the following:-

  • get_users - returns a dict of users on the system
  • add_user - adds a new user to the system
  • manage_user - manages users attributes such as password, sshkey, description and privileges
  • remove_user - removes a user by username
  • get_groups - returns a dict of groups on the system
  • add_group - creates a new local user group
  • manage_group - manages the description, privileges and users in a group
  • remove_group - removes a group by group name

You can review the code here:- https://github.com/ndejong/pfsense_fauxapi_client_python/blob/master/examples/usergroup-management.py

The thing to remember is that FauxAPI is a tool for interacting with the pfSense configuration file and as such you sometimes need to do a bit of extra work here and there - in this case we need to increment the nextuid and nextguid fields after adding users and groups - works just fine though

I ended up implementing a lot more functionality than the original question was asking because I wanted to know that it was possible to add/remove/manage all aspects of a user and their privileges which then extended into doing the same thing for user-groups.

More than this, it is a good demonstration of what the FauxAPI is and what it is not - it is a tool for interacting with the pfSense configuration file and is it not a per action API that interacts with the entire pfSense system. This is because the code behind pfSense does not separate code that renders the user-interface views from the code that handles system control features and functions which in turn means it is practically impossible to establish a nicely structured API that provides access and control to all the functionality within pfSense. Being able to interact with the configuration file in a programmatic manner is however enormously useful and powerful.