Creating a Sudo User

A sudo user is a regular user that runs commands without admin rights. Prefix a command with sudo when it needs admin rights. A mistake as a sudo user does less damage than a mistake as root.

Creating the user

Replace alice with the name you want.

On Debian and Ubuntu:

adduser alice
usermod -aG sudo alice

adduser asks for a password twice and some optional details. Press Enter to skip the details.

On Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and other RHEL based systems:

useradd -m alice
passwd alice
usermod -aG wheel alice

Testing sudo

Switch to the new user and run a command with sudo:

su - alice
sudo whoami

sudo asks for the new user’s password. If it prints root, the user has sudo access. If it prints “alice is not in the sudoers file”, the usermod command did not run.

Logging in as the new user with SSH keys

To log in as the new user with the same SSH keys as root, copy them over as root:

cp -r ~/.ssh /home/alice/
chown -R alice:alice /home/alice/.ssh

Then connect with ssh [email protected].