Where does the "zimbra" user get authentication information from

Question

On a typical Zimbra mailserver installation, when logging into the machine as user "zimbra", the commands zmprov, etc. will just automagically know how to authenticate to the admin API.

Now I want to run some of my tools that use the SOAP API by themselves - can I somehow access the admin credentials that seem to be already present?

zmlocalconfig does not seem to display dedicated admin credentials or tokens. (Just for ldap, etc.)

I did an strace on tools like zmprov, zmsoap, etc. and they all just seem to access zmlocalconfig.

(Not sure if this might be better suited for serverfault, but since it is about API usage, I thought here would be better)

Answer 1

to access command line with full zimbra power one need to

su - zimbra
source /opt/zimbra/bin/zmshutil
zmsetvars
env #to show your env