How to Create a Sudo User on a Linux Server
Creating a sudo user improves security by allowing you to perform administrative tasks without logging in as the root user. It helps reduce the risk of accidental system wide changes and improves auditing capabilities. By assigning sudo privileges to specific users, you can also achieve finer grained permission management and control who can perform administrative operations.
This article explains how to create a sudo user on multiple distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, and FreeBSD.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, you need to:
- Have access to a Linux server as a root or non-root user with sudo privileges.
Follow the steps below to create a new user and give them sudo privileges.
Create a new user. Replace
johnwith your desired username.CONSOLEWhen prompted, enter a password for the user and other additional information such as full name or phone number.
Add the new user to the
sudogroup to grantsudoprivileges.CONSOLESwitch to the newly created user account.
CONSOLERun a
sudocommand to confirm that the user hassudoprivileges.CONSOLEWhen prompted, enter the user's password. If the command returns
root, it confirms that the user can execute commands with sudo privileges. For advanced configurations, such as managing password prompts or restricting specific commands, refer to this article.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned how to create a sudo user in Debian-based and FreeBSD systems. You created a new user, assigned the appropriate group membership (sudo or wheel), and verified administrative access using sudo. These steps improved system security by limiting direct root usage and enabled controlled, auditable administrative privileges across different operating systems.
Tags:Ubuntu / Debian
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