// Tutorial //
How To Create a Sudo User on CentOS [Quickstart]
![How To Create a Sudo User on CentOS [Quickstart]](/_next/static/media/intro-to-cloud.d49bc5f7.jpeg "How To Create a Sudo User on CentOS [Quickstart]")
This tutorial is out of date and no longer maintained.
Please refer instead to our updated quickstart tutorial, How To Create a New Sudo-enabled User on CentOS 8.
Introduction
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 the easiest way to create a new user with sudo access on CentOS, without having to modify your server’s sudoers file. If you want to configure sudo for an existing user, simply skip to step 3.
Steps to Create a New Sudo User
-
Log in to your server as the
rootuser.- ssh root@server_ip_address
-
Use the
addusercommand to add a new user to your system.Be sure to replace username with the user that you want to create.
- adduser username
-
Use the
passwdcommand to update the new user’s password.- passwd username
-
Set and confirm the new user’s password at the prompt. A strong password is highly recommended!
Set password prompts:Changing password for user username. New password: Retype new password: passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
-
Use the
usermodcommand to add the user to thewheelgroup.- usermod -aG wheel username
By default, on CentOS, members of the
wheelgroup have sudo privileges. -
Test sudo access on new user account
-
Use the
sucommand to switch to the new user account.- su - username
-
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
/rootdirectory, which is normally only accessible to the root user.- sudo ls -la /root
-
The first time you use
sudoin a session, you will be prompted for the password of the user account. Enter the password to proceed.Output:[sudo] password for username:If your user is in the proper group and you entered the password correctly, the command that you issued with sudo should run with root privileges.
-
Related Tutorials
Here is a link to a more detailed user management tutorial:
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that worked for me as expected (centos 7), you should open an other NEW SESSION and make test e.g.
ls -la /rootYou can make things more “proper” : Add new group, let say
mycompanyGo under
/etc/sudoers.d/and create new file, let say70-mycompany-usersAdd these lines
Add user to group
Now open NEW SESSION with username credits and make test
Now prefix that commande with sudo
Hope this help someone else.
Thanks, this works for me. The only issue it hadn’t stated is that it only takes effect in a new session. i.e. Starting a new terminal doesn’t work, While doing logout and login again worked for me.
I’m unsure if CentOS changed this in their latest release, but after adding the new user to the
wheelgroup, I needed to uncomment this line in thesudofile:This gives
wheelsudo access.Hi, this doesn’t work for me. I added my new user to the wheel group (on centos 6.8 x64) and I just get a message saying that I am not a sudoer and that this will be reported.
How do I complete this setup?
The easiest way to allow a user to have same rights as root is as follows:
edit /etc/sudoers file and below this section:
Same thing without a password
%wheel ALL=(ALL)
add similar line for your user e.g.: %username ALL=(ALL)
I believe that the below command is unnecessarily then (but I have done it as per the manual above):
usermod -aG wheel username
The above works in you home lab/project where only a single or a few users can be added with root priviledges and no password is required (for convenience) when running root-related commands e.g. sudo yum update or like earlier: sudo ls -alh /root etc.
Now this tutorial is complete! have fun people!
This doesn’t working anymore!! please delete the tutorial. to not confuse other peoplel