Superuser Me

Just a quick post on the sudo command as it pertains to vanilla Debian. Its one of those things I take for granted on the derivatives and forget I need to install on a fresh VM or Debian machine. I won’t go into too much detail here as to the importance not executing commands as root etc. This is more for my personal reference. Yes, I know tons of guides are already out there about this and its only like six steps… but this blog is kinda about self hosting and publicizing my documentation.

Lets assume we’ve got Debian installed and are logged into the CLI as our user. We’ll call him medic.

If were already logged in as the root user, maybe a new CT, skip to this section

Switch to the root user by typing su - in the command line followed by the root password.

Don’t miss the - in the above command as it initializes the root path and allows us to add a user later.

Then install sudo with the standard apt command:

apt install sudo

Next, add any user that needs sudo access to the sudo group. In this example our user is medic

adduser medic sudo

We should see an output similar to below:

Adding user `medic' to group `sudo'

Once this is complete, exit the root shell and completely log out.

Log back in as our newly added sudo user and try to run a command with sudo.

If it all went well, the command should run without issues and we are now able to elevate this user to sudo.

Already Root?

If were already in the system as root the steps are a bit different, especially if we don’t already have a user initialized.

As the root user, first thing is to create our new user. In this example I’ll use appuser.

adduser appuser

The system will create appuser then prompt for a user password and demographics. Enter them as they apply.

To remove this user simply run the deluser command. Example: deluser appuser

Since this post is about sudo we need to make sure we’ve installed that too.

apt install sudo

Then add our new user to the sudo group.

usermod -aG sudo appuser

Log out of root and log back in as this new appuser. Try and run a sudo command and everything should work.

Pretty simple and Linux 101 stuff but for some reason, I always need to review it when rebuilding my systems.

Happy sudoing!