> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://devdocs.xbox.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Headless automation of XUser

> Headless automation of XUser

For testing, games might want to automate the addition of users into their game. With the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK),
users are only added when the game calls [XUserAddAsync](/reference/system/xuser/functions/xuseraddasync). With respect to
automation, this function has the following two main limitations.

* If you call `XUserAddAsync` with the `AddDefaultUserSilently`flag, you don't get UI (which
  helps with the automation). However, you can only get the user who launched the game.
  Calling the API repeatedly with this flag doesn't change the result. You'll just keep
  getting new handles to the same users.
* If you call `XUserAddAsync` without the `AddDefaultUserSilently` flag, the UI
  appears and waits for someone to push a button. This breaks automation.

To aid in the automation of adding users in test code, the Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) has support for turning on a
headless option where you can add users without having UI show that requires user input. The
following steps outline the basic approach.

1. To add a signed-in user to the console, you can use the [xbuser (NDA topic)](/tools/tools-console/commandlinetools/xbuser)
   command-line tool with the `signin` option. Repeat this step for each user.
2. To suppress the UI that would usually show when adding a user in the game, you
   can use the [xbconfig (NDA topic)](/tools/tools-console/commandlinetools/xbconfig) command-line tool with the `HeadlessXuser` option, shown as follows.

```
    xbconfig HeadlessXUser=true
```

3. Launch the game.
4. When in the game, each call to `XUserAddAsync` that doesn't have the
   `AddDefaultUserSilently` flag returns the first user who signed in to the console and
   has no outstanding `XUserHandle` objects associated to them by the game.
5. If the game keeps calling `XUserAddAsync`, it eventually exhausts the number
   of users who are signed in to the console. After this happens, `XUserAddAsync`
   returns `E_ABORT`. This is the exact same error that `XUserAddAsync` would have returned
   if the user had canceled out of signing in to the console (or otherwise backed out of the
   UI).
6. For testing purposes, games might want to know the number of [test accounts](/services/xbox-services/develop/test-accounts/live-setup-testaccounts) that are
   signed in to the console. To facilitate this, games can call `CreateProcess` and launch
   the `wduser` command-line tool with the `list` option.


## Related topics

- [Users](/build/core-features/common/user/user-toc.md)
- [User identity and XUser APIs in the GDK](/build/core-features/common/user/index.md)
- [XUser](/reference/system/xuser/xuser_members.md)
- [User identity and XUser](/build/core-features/common/user/player-identity-xuser.md)
- [XBOX Manager: managing console automation](/tools/tools-console/xbom/manager-tool-automation.md)