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Clarify File-based grants are not visible with API calls

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale

Research direction

Start with the defining-roles and mapping-roles documentation pages linked in the issue, then compare their descriptions with the provided API examples. Clarify that users, roles, and mappings defined in files or through the users CLI are not reported by the corresponding management APIs, and verify the updated wording against both examples.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

:Security

The following is true of all versions: The APIs (user, role, role mapping) only work with objects that were defined via the API.

Objects (users, roles, mappings) defined in files need to be managed via the files (or the users CLI tool which uses the files).

API exploration calls (and consecutively, Kibana) will not report roles and mappings defined in files.

Example, where role production_user is defined in roles.yml and user "test" is a file realm user created with the users CLI tool.

curl -X GET -u test:password http://localhost:9200/_xpack/security/_authenticate
{"username":"test","roles":["production_user"],"full_name":null,"email":null,"metadata":{},"enabled":true}[root@localhost x-pack]# 

curl -X GET -u test:password http://localhost:9200/_xpack/security/role/production_user
{}

curl -X GET -u elastic:password http://localhost:9200/_xpack/security/user/test
{}

Some places to update docs to reflect this behavior:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elastic-stack-overview/6.6/defining-roles.html#roles-management-file

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elastic-stack-overview/6.6/mapping-roles.html#mapping-roles-file

Dominant language
Java
Stars
105
Forks
249
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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