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Table of Contents
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 how to create a new user with sudo access on CentOS 8, without having to modify your server's /etc/sudoers file.
Note: If you want to configure sudo for an existing CentOS user, skip to step 3.
Step 1 — Logging Into Your Server
SSH in to your server as the root user:
[environment local]
ssh root@<^>your_server_ip_address<^>
Use your server's IP address or hostname in place of <^>your_server_ip_address<^> above.
Step 2 — Adding a New User to the System
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:
[secondary_label Output]
Changing password for user <^>sammy<^>.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
Step 3 — Adding the User to the wheel Group
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 priveleges to. By default, on CentOS, all members of the wheel group have full sudo access.
Step 4 — Testing sudo Access
To 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:
[secondary_label 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 issued with sudo will run with root privileges.
Conclusion
In this quickstart tutorial we created a new user account and added it to the wheel group to enable sudo access. For more detailed information on setting up a CentOS 8 server, please read our Initial Server Setup with CentOS 8 tutorial.
