Create new user on Ubuntu

Dmytro Tus

Full Stack Web developer

Sometimes we need to create another user on remote server. And add custom priveleges to it. Let's make it on Ubuntu machine. I assume we have root access to the server.

Lets login as root

ssh root@<my-server-ip>

Later create user

adduser my-temporary-user

To check all users on Ubuntu machine run

cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd

List of the users will be very long...

But when we want to list only numan we should run

awk -F: '$3 >= 1000 { print $1 }' /etc/passwd

Later we need to create ssh key pair for login our new user

First we need to login as our new user from the root

su - my-temporary-user

Probably new user will not have ssh folder so we need to create it and add permissions

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh

Than, generate key pair for this user

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "my-temporary-user" ## message can be any but I named the same as user to make it more understandable

ls -l

##output
my-temporary-user
my-temporary-user.pub

Add the key to the authorized keys

cat ~/.ssh/my-temporary-user.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Copy the key to the local computer. In my case to the desktop, because later I wil transfer that to another local machine

scp root@<my-server-ip>:/home/my-temporary-user/.ssh/my_temporary_user ~/Desktop/my_temporary_user

Then, copy from my local machine Desktop to the ssh keys of my local server

scp ~/Desktop/my_temporary_user username@<ip-local-server>:.ssh/my_temporary_user 

## apply permisions from the local machine
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/my_temporary_user