The User Sync Tool is a command-line tool that automates the creation and management of Adobe user accounts. It does this by reading user and group information from an organization's enterprise directory system or a file and then creating, updating, or removing user accounts in the Adobe Admin Console. The key goals of the User Sync Tool are to streamline the process of named user deployment and automate user management for all Adobe users and products.

This application is open source, maintained by Adobe, and distributed under the terms of the OSI-approved MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.

Copyright (c) 2016-2017 Adobe Systems Incorporated.

The User Sync Documentation covers all aspects of the tool, from both a general and a technical point of view. The following links are good places to start:

• User Sync Overview
• Non-Technical Primer
• User Manual
• Step-by-Step Setup

To run User Sync, you must have an up-to-date 64-bit Python installed on your system, either Python 2.7 or Python 3.4+. In addition you must have User Management API Credentials for your organization (see the official documentation)

The connector is packaged as a self-contained Python Executable (aka PEX) file. See the releases page to get the latest build for your platform. Download the release tarball onto your system, extract it, and you will have a file named user-sync (or user-sync.pex) that can be executed from the command line:

• On Mac OS X and Linux systems, use the command user-sync.
• On Windows systems, use the command python user-sync.pex.

Until you have personalized your User Sync configuration (see next section), you won't be able to do much. But you can test that your installation is working with:

• user-sync --version (or python user-sync.pex --version) and
• user-sync --help (or python user-sync.pex --help)

There are a wide variety of command-line arguments; see the docs for details.

You will need a personalized User Sync configuration to use the tool effectively. The documentation includes a Setup and Success Guide that will take you step-by-step through the configuration process. In addition, the examples directory (also available as a tarball on the releases page) contains sample configuration files which include all of the possible options with their descriptions and default values.

To build User Sync from source, you will need to have a complete Python/Pip/Virtualenv stack present on your system, as well as make and the ability to install Python modules that use native extensions.

The platform-independent overview is:

1. Get the sources into a user-sync.py directory (either via git or by downloading the source tarball from a release).
2. Make a clean virtual environment for the 64-bit Python version you want to use (2.7 or 3.4+) and activate it.
3. Switch into the user-sync.py directory, and give the command make pex.

While that looks simple, the make pex command will try to download and install all of the User Sync dependencies, and that process can be tricky. Below is platform-specific advice to make sure it goes as well as possible.

We pre-package releases on Ubuntu, so the advice here is definitely accurate for that platform, but something similar should work for most other Debian variants.

• Make sure you have Python 2.7.5 or above; earlier versions will give you InsecurePlatformWarning messages due to older SSL components.
• For Ubuntu 16.04, an easy way to get python 3.6 is from the Jonathan F archive, do:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/python-3.6
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install -y python3.6

• Take all security updates before you start.
• You don't need a GUI on the platform, as the entire build can be done from the command line. Server variants are fine.
• You will need a standard C development environment to build a variety of the modules that use native extensions. Use this command to get one:

  sudo apt-get install -y build-essential

• Make sure you use the system package manager to install the following packages (and their dependencies):
  • python-dev (or python3.6-dev if you are doing python3 builds)
  • python-pip (or python3-pip if you are doing python3 builds)
  • python-virtualenv (or python3-virtualenv if you are doing python3 builds)
  • pkg-config
  • libssl-dev
  • libldap2-dev
  • libsasl2-dev
  • python-dbus-devel
  • libffi-dev
• For convenience, you can copy and paste these commands (choosing from the first two based on your python version):

  sudo apt-get install -y python-dev python-pip python-virtualenv
  sudo apt-get install -y python3.6-dev
  sudo apt-get install -y pkg-config libssl-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev dbus-glib-devel python-dbus libffi-dev

• You need the python-dbus package to build user-sync, but you don't need it to run user-sync unless you use the dbus secure store for your credentials.

We pre-package releases on CentOS, so the advice here is definitely accurate for that platform, but something similar should work for most other RedHat variants.

• Make sure you have Python 2.7.5 or above; earlier versions will give you InsecurePlatformWarning messages due to older SSL components.
• You cannot build on CentOS 6, because user-sync uses python-dbus for the keyring, and python-dbus requires dbus 1.6 or greater which is not available on CentOS 6. However, you can run a CentOS 7 build on CentOS 6 as long as you are running the same build of python 3.6 or later.
  • For centos6, to run builds, you will need to install python 3.6, which you can do as follows:

    sudo yum install -y https://centos6.iuscommunity.org/ius-release.rpm # installs inline-upstream-stable pkg repo
    sudo yum install -y python36u-devel python36u-pip python36u-virtualenv

  • For centos7, to install python 3.6, do the following:

    sudo yum install -y https://centos7.iuscommunity.org/ius-release.rpm # installs inline-upstream-stable pkg repo
    sudo yum install -y python36u-devel python36u-pip python36u-virtualenv

• Take all security updates before you start.
• You don't need a GUI on the platform, as the entire build can be done from the command line. Server variants are fine.
• You will need a standard C development environment to build a variety of the modules that use native extensions. Use this command to get one:

  sudo yum groupinstall -y "Development Tools"

• Your OS may not know about pip by default, although it will know about virtualenv. Rather than installing pip manually, we recommend telling your OS about the Red Hat "Extra Package for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)" package library, which on CentOS you can do with:

  sudo yum install -y epel-release

• Make sure you use the system package manager to install the following packages (and their dependencies):
  • python-devel (or python36u-devel, if you are doing python3 builds)
  • python-pip (or python36u-pip, if you are doing python3 builds)
  • python-virtualenv (or python36u-virtualenv, if you are doing python3 builds)
  • pkgconfig
  • openssl-devel
  • openldap-devel (includes sasl)
  • dbus-glib-devel
  • dbus-python (version 1.6 or greater, not available on CentOS 6)
  • libffi-devel
• For convenience, you can copy and paste these commands (pick among the first two based on your python version):

  sudo yum install -y python-devel python-pip python-virtualenv
  sudo yum install -y python36u-devel python36u-pip python36u-virtualenv
  sudo yum install -y pkgconfig openssl-devel openldap-devel dbus-glib-devel dbus-python libffi-devel

On Mac OS X there are a wide variety of ways to get current Python installations that don't interfere with the system-required Python, and a wide way of creating virtual environments for that Python. We strongly recommend using pyenv for installation and maintenance and pyenv-virtualenv for virtual environment support. And we recommend getting those via homebrew. The sequence for this is:

1. Install the latest version of the Apple Developer Command Line Tools via xcode-select --install.
2. Install Homebrew per the directions here.
3. Install openssl via Homebrew: brew install openssl
4. Install pyenv via Homebrew: brew install pyenv
5. Install pyenv-virtualenv via Homebrew: brew install pyenv-virtualenv
6. Find your desired Python version with: pyenv install --list
7. Install that python with pyenv install ##, where ## is the desired version number.
8. Create a virtual environment for your builds, with pyenv virtualenv ## myname.
9. In your user-sync.py source directory, activate that virtual environment with pyenv local myname.

This sequence not only ensures that you are set up to do Python extension compiles, but also that they will know how to find the openssl libraries, and that you can easily install any other needed development libraries with Homebrew.

In general, regardless of how you get your Python, you will need:

• The latest security updates.
• The latest openssl (see above).
• The latest version of XCode and/or the Developer Command Line Tools (see above).
• Installs of modern openssl, ffi, and pkg-config libraries. With Homebrew, you can do:

  homebrew install pkg-config openssl libffi

• To know how to include the XCode include directory in a compile spawned from pip install. If you didn't do a command line developer tools install (which puts the headers into /usr/include), you can do:
  • CFLAGS="-I$(xcrun --show-sdk-path) pip install ....
• To know how to include a modern openssl header path in a pip install. If you installed your Python via Homebrew or pyenv, this is taken care of for you, see above. Otherwise, if you installed ssl with Homebrew, you can do:CFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix openssl)/include" LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib" pip install ....

Windows is the trickiest platform because you need a command line development environment and package manager, and many of the dependencies don't have Windows builds available on PyPI. So rather than building from Windows on scratch, we recommend the following procedure:

• Install Cygwin to get a bash command-line, together with basic tools such as git and make. You will need to specify in the Cygwin installer that you want git and make installed, because they are not defaults. Alternatively, you can install the entire Cygwin suite of development tools, but that's probably more than you need.
• Use the python.org 64-bit installers for the desired version of Python.
• Install the latest Visual C++ Redistributable Libraries from Microsoft (because python3 will need these to run in a virtual environment).
• For the User Sync dependencies that don't have Windows 64-bit wheels on PyPI, get builds from Christoph Guelke's excellent site. We have stashed the ones needed for the current release in the external directory, and that's where the Makefile looks for them, so if you go fetch your own be sure to put them in that same directory.

Having performed the above steps, you can follow the "generic" instructions and the build should "just work".