When running Bitcoin installed from a binary, the RPCAuth script found at share/rpcauth/rpcauth.py is inaccessible to the user without cloning from the repo, despite being referenced in bitcoind -help:

RPC server options:
[...]
  -rpcauth=<userpw>
       Username and hashed password for JSON-RPC connections. The field
       <userpw> comes in the format: <USERNAME>:<SALT>$<HASH>. A
       canonical python script is included in share/rpcuser. The client
       then connects normally using the
       rpcuser=<USERNAME>/rpcpassword=<PASSWORD> pair of arguments. This
       option can be specified multiple times

v0.16.3, via tarball

Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS

This could be resolved by including the script in the tarball's share directory, so that is accessible to users. Being a small script, this would not require much overhead. Alternatively, another method could be given to allow the user to generate salted password hashes, perhaps as a command line executable.

cc @harding