User setup for configuring Proxmox Backup Server on Proxmox

While configuring my Proxmox Backup Server on my Proxmox server, I had to specify user credentials on how the latter will access the former.

Now, I (naturally) didn’t want to use root credentials of PBS as-is for security reasons. In my first attempt a few months ago, I created a new user on PBS specifically for this purpose and threw away the password after the initial setup. Effectively, I used temporary credentials.

This time around, when I was setting up PBS from scratch for unrelated reasons, I discovered a new feature: API tokens. That allowed me to create an API token for my root user, specify precisely the permissions it has (for e.g., “allow DatastorePowerUser role on path == /datastore”) and use those as temporary or one-time-use credentials.

Pretty cool.