Impersonate

Allow administrators to become a different user by adding an impersonate action to the user list. This is especially useful for debugging issues reported by users.

To impersonate a user an administrator has to simply follow the following four steps:

1. Login as administrator to Nextcloud.
2. Open users administration interface.
3. Select the impersonate button on the affected user.
4. Confirm the impersonation.

The administrator is then logged-in as the user, to switch back to the regular user account they simply have to press the logout button.

Notifications and audit trail

Impersonation actions are logged in the Nextcloud log file at warning level, and Impersonate can also notify users when their account is impersonated by another user.

Notifications are configurable depending on whether the impersonated account belongs to a regular user or to an administrator. This allows stronger alerting policies for administrator impersonation (for example, email notifications).

Configuration is stored in the impersonate.notifications system setting. Default values:

'impersonate.notifications' => [ 'user' => 0, 'admin' => 0, ],

Available notification modes are bitwise flags and can be combined together:

• 0 : No notification
• 1 : Push notification via the Notifications app
• 2 : Email notification
• 4 : Entry in the Activity app

Note:

• This app is not compatible with instances that have encryption enabled.
• While impersonate actions are logged, note that actions performed impersonated will be logged as the impersonated user.
• Impersonating a user is only possible after their first login.