User Management
Default View
The default view displays basic information about your users.
The Group filter on the left sidebar lets you quickly filter users by their group memberships, and create new groups.
Click the gear icon on the lower left sidebar to view the avaiable settings.
User accounts have the following properties:
- Login Name (Username)
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The unique ID of an ownCloud user, and it cannot be changed.
- Full Name
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The user’s display name that appears on file shares, the ownCloud Web interface, and emails. Admins and users may change the Full Name anytime. If the Full Name is not set it defaults to the login name.
- Password
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The admin sets the new user’s first password. Both the user and the admin can change the user’s password at anytime.
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The admin sets the new user’s E-Mail. The user then get’s an E-Mail to set his Password. Both the user and the admin can change the user’s E-Mail at anytime.
- Groups
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You may create groups, and assign group memberships to users. By default new users are not assigned to any groups.
- Group Admin
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Group admins are granted administrative privileges on specific groups, and can add and remove users from their groups.
- Quota
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The maximum disk space assigned to each user. Any user that exceeds the quota cannot upload or sync data. You have the option to include external storage in user quotas.
Creating a New User
To create a user account:
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Enter the new user’s Login Name and their E-Mail
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Optionally, assign Groups memberships
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Click the Create button
Login names may contain letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), dashes (-), underscores (_), periods (.) and at signs (@). After creating the user, you may fill in their Full Name if it is different than the login name, or leave it for the user to complete.
Password Reset
You cannot recover a user’s password, but you can set a new one:
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Hover your cursor over the user’s Password field
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Click on the pencil icon
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Enter the user’s new password in the password field, and remember to provide the user with their password
If you have encryption enabled, there are special considerations for user password resets.
Renaming a User
Each ownCloud user has two names: a unique Login Name used for authentication, and a Full Name, which is their display name. You can edit the display name of a user, but you cannot change the login name of any user.
To set or change a user’s display name:
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Hover your cursor over the user’s Full Name field
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Click on the pencil icon
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Enter the user’s new display name
Deleting Users
To delete a user, hover your cursor over their name on the Users page, and click the trashcan icon that appears at the far right. You’ll then see a confirmation dialog appear, asking if you’re sure that you want to delete the user.
If you click Yes, the user is permanently deleted, including all of the files owned by the user, including all files they have shared. If you need to preserve the user’s files and shares, you must first download them from your ownCloud Files page, (which compresses them into a zip file).
Alternatively, you can use a sync client to copy them to your local computer. If you click No, the confirmation dialog will disappear and the user is not deleted.
| See File Sharing Configuration to learn how to create persistent file shares that survive user deletions. |
Granting Administrator Privileges
ownCloud has two types of administrators:
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ownCloud Administrators have full rights on your ownCloud server, and can access and modify all settings. To assign the ownCloud Administrators role to a user, simply add them to the
admingroup. -
Group Administrators. Group administrators have the rights to create, edit and delete users in their assigned groups. Use the dropdown menus in the Group Admin column to assign group admin privileges.
Managing Groups
You can assign new users to groups when you create them, and create new groups when you create new users. You may also use the Add Group button at the top of the left pane to create new groups. New group members will immediately have access to file shares that belong to their new groups.
Enabling Custom Groups
In previous versions of ownCloud, files and folders could only be shared with individual users or groups created by administrators. This wasn’t the most efficient way to work. From ownCloud 10.0, users can create groups on-the-fly, through a feature called "Custom Groups", enabling them to share content in a more flexible way.
To enable Custom Groups:
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From the ownCloud Market, which you can find in version 10.0 under the Apps menu, click Market.
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Click Collaboration (1), to filter the list of available options and click the Custom groups application (2).
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Click INSTALL in the bottom right-hand corner of the Custom Groups application.
With this done, Custom Group functionality will be available in your ownCloud installation.
Overriding Default Behavior
Disabling Administrators from Administering Custom Groups
Depending on your Custom Groups and ownCloud’s global settings, configured by the ownCloud admin, Custom Groups may behave differently:
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Creating or renaming a Custom Group using an existing name of another Custom Group can be allowed or not depending on administrative settings.
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Custom Group creation can be limited to ownCloud group admins.
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Disable administration of Custom Groups by ownCloud administrators. This is enabled by setting
customgroups.disallow-admin-access-alltotrueinconfig/config.php.
Hide Custom Groups App Based On Group Membership
The app can be hidden from the user’s personal settings page if the user belongs to one or more disallowed groups,
To specify the disallowed groups, list them against the customgroups.disallowed-groups key in config/config.php, as in the following example.
// Hide the Custom Groups app for users in the "guest_app" group.
'customgroups.disallowed-groups' => ['guest_app'],Setting Storage Quotas
There are 4 types of quota settings in ownCloud when dealing with LDAP users.
Quota Field
Found in , this setting overwrites the rest. If set, this is what will be set for an LDAP user’s quota in ownCloud.
Default Quota
This will be set if no quota is set, and is found in . If Quota Field is not set, but Quota Default is, and a systems administrator tries to set a quota for an LDAP user with User Quota, it will not work, since it is overridden by Quota Default.
Click the gear icon on the lower left pane to set a default storage quota. This is automatically applied to new users. You may assign a different quota to any user by selecting from the Quota dropdown, selecting either a preset value or entering a custom value. When you create custom quotas, use the normal abbreviations for your storage values such as 500 MB, 5 GB, 5 TB, and so on.
External Storage Quota
You now have a configurable option in config.php that controls whether
external storage is counted against user’s quotas. This is still
experimental, and may not work as expected. The default is to not count
external storage as part of user storage quotas. If you prefer to
include it, then change the default false to true.:
'quota_include_external_storage' => false,
Storage Space Considerations
Metadata (such as thumbnails, temporary files, and encryption keys) takes up about 10% of disk space, but is not counted against user quotas. Users can check their used and available space on their Personal pages. Only files that originate with users count against their quotas, and not files shared with them that originate from other users. For example, if you upload files to a different user’s share, those files count against your quota. If you re-share a file that another user shared with you, that file does not count against your quota, but the originating user’s.
Encrypted files are a little larger than unencrypted files; the unencrypted size is calculated against the user’s quota.
Deleted files that are still in the trash bin do not count against quotas. The trash bin is set at 50% of quota. Deleted file aging is set at 30 days. When deleted files exceed 50% of quota then the oldest files are removed until the total is below 50%.