How To Add a User and Grant Root Privileges on Fedora 23

Posted on January 25, 2016 by dpepper

Category: Tutorials | Tags: Adduser, Fedora 23, grant option

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Note:

Please note that this article is considered legacy documentation because this OS has reached its end-of-life support.

Users via Command Line 101: Basic User Interaction

I. How to Add a User and Grant Root Privileges on Fedora 23
II. How to Remove (Delete) a User on Fedora 23

Pre-Flight Check

These instructions are specifically for adding a user on Fedora 23. The process is identical in most other Linux operating systems.
For this tutorial, we’ll be using a Liquid Web Self Managed Fedora 23 server, logged in as root.

Step #1: Add the User

In this case, we’re adding a user called “newuser”:

adduser newuser

Now set the new user’s password:

passwd newuser

After entering the new password, you will need to enter it a second time to confirm.

Step #2: Give the User Root Privileges

We’ll need to edit the sudoers file to add permissions for the new user. To open the file for editing, enter the following command:

visudo

In vim, you can press “a” to enter text insertion mode, and hit the escape key (Esc) on your keyboard to return to command mode. For a refresher on editing files with vim see: New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor.

Find the following code:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere root ALL=(ALL) ALL

In this case, we’re granting root privileges to the user “newuser”. Add the following below that code:

newuser ALL=(ALL) ALL

Then type :wq to exit and save the file.

If you’ve followed the instructions correctly, then you now should have a user named newuser who can use sudo to run commands as root!

Should you want to remove (delete) the user, follow the instructions at How To Remove (Delete) a User on Fedora 23.