Setting a droplet password via API

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