How to add a sudo enabled user on Rocky Linux 8 ? Print

The sudo command provides a mechanism to grant administrator privileges to all other users on the server. These admin privileges are usually available only to the root user. This guide will help you how to create a new user with sudo access on Rocky Linux 8, without having to modify your server’s /etc/sudoers file.

Step 1 — Logging Into Your Server

SSH in to your server as the root user:

Use your server’s IP address or hostname in place of your_server_ip_address above.

Step 2 — Add a New User

Use the adduser command to add a new user to your system:

Be sure to replace user123 with the username you’d like to create.

Use the passwd command to update the new user’s password:

Changing password for user user123.
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:

Step 4 — Test 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:

As the new user, verify that you can use sudo by prepending sudo to the command that you want to run with superuser privileges:

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:

[sudo] password for user123:

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.