Senior DevOps Technical Writer
The sudo
command provides a mechanism for granting administrator privileges — ordinarily only available to the root user — to normal users. This guide will show you how to create a new user with sudo
access on Rocky Linux 8, without having to modify your server’s /etc/sudoers
file.
Note: If you want to configure sudo
for an existing Rocky Linux user, skip to step 3.
SSH in to your server as the root user:
- ssh root@your_server_ip_address
Use your server’s IP address or hostname in place of your_server_ip_address
above.
Use the adduser
command to add a new user to your system:
- adduser sammy
Be sure to replace sammy
with the username you’d like to create.
Use the passwd
command to update the new user’s password:
- passwd sammy
Remember to replace sammy
with the user that you just created. You will be prompted twice for a new password:
OutputChanging password for user sammy.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
Use the usermod
command to add the user to the wheel group:
- usermod -aG wheel sammy
Once again, be sure to replace sammy
with the username you’d like to give sudo
privileges to. By default, on Rocky Linux, all members of the wheel group have full sudo
access.
sudo
AccessTo test that the new sudo
permissions are working, first use the su
command to switch from the root user to the new user account:
- su - sammy
As the new user, verify that you can use sudo
by prepending sudo
to the command that you want to run with superuser privileges:
- sudo command_to_run
For example, you can list the contents of the /root
directory, which is normally only accessible to the root user:
- sudo ls -la /root
The first time you use sudo
in a session, you will be prompted for the password of that user’s account. Enter the password to proceed:
Output[sudo] password for sammy:
Note: This is not asking for the root password! Enter the password of the sudo-enabled user, not the root password.
If your user is in the proper group and you entered the password correctly, the command that you used with sudo
will run with root privileges.
In this quickstart tutorial you created a new user account and added it to the wheel group to enable sudo
access. For more detailed information on setting up a Rocky Linux 8 server, please read our Initial Server Setup with Rocky Linux 8 tutorial.
Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.
Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
How do you create and set the user’s group?