Question

Setting a droplet password via API

I’m trying to create a Droplet via the API. Is there a way to set an SSH password? I would rather not use SSH keys.

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alexdo
Site Moderator
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• March 21, 2023

Hello @trentseal

You can use Bobby’s suggestion to pass the user_data parameter to set the root password.

If you are creating a Droplet with the doctl command line tool, you can pass in the script using the --user-data-file option:

  1. doctl compute droplet create ... --user-data-file /path/to/script

If you do not want to use user data, you can also run the script manually over SSH once the server is booted up.

I’ll still recommend using ssh-keys as it’s more secure and you can also limit the access to the droplet to certain IP addresses as an additional step to tighten up the security.

Regards

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• March 19, 2023

Hi there,

I don’t think that this is available out of the box, but what you could do is to pass a user_data parameter with a shell script or a ‘cloud-config’ configuration with

A string containing ‘user data’ which may be used to configure the Droplet on first boot, often a ‘cloud-config’ file or Bash script. It must be plain text and may not exceed 64 KiB in size.

Here is an example of such a Bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# Enable SSH password authentication and root login
sed -i 's/#PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i 's/#PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# Restart SSH service
systemctl restart sshd

# Set a root password
echo "root:<your-password-here>" | chpasswd

This script will run on the initial Droplet boot up.

For the API call, you might have to convert this into 1 liner, eg:

#/bin/bash ; sed -i 's/#PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication yes/g;s/#PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config && systemctl restart sshd && echo "root:<your-password-here>" | chpasswd

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby