How to Create a New Sudo User on Debian 10 Buster

You can give sudo rights to any existing user by adding it to the sudo group. With the following command I will create the user called linuxhintuser to add it to the sudo group later, to create the user linuxhintuser I execute:

# sudo adduser linuxhintuser

You can fill the requested information or leave it blank and press ENTER to continue, finally type Y to confirm and press ENTER to finish.

Once existing you can modify a user granting it sudo rights by adding it to the sudo group. To modify a user the command is usermod:

# sudo usermod -aG sudo linuxhintuser

Where:
-a: add
-G: group
To check if the user was properly added to the sudo group you can run:

# sudo -l -U linuxhintuser

If the output is similar to the following then you’ll see a similar screen:

Otherwise if the user isn’t in the sudo group the output will be like:

Where:
-l: list
-U: username

How to remove a user from the sudo group on Debian 10 Buster

Removing a user from the sudo group can be achieved invoking the command deluser followed by the username and the group name like in the following example:

# sudo deluser linuxhintuser sudo

deluser options:

–conf FILE{Use FILE instead of the default files /etc/deluser.conf and /etc/adduser.conf}

–group {Remove a group.This is the default action if the program is ran as delgroup.}

–help {Display brief instructions. }

–quiet {Suppress progress messages.}

–system {Only delete if user/group is a system user/group. This avoids
accidentally deleting non-system users/groups. Additionally, if the user does not exist,
no error value is returned. This option is mainly for use in Debian
package maintainer scripts.}

–only-if-empty {Only remove if no members are left.}

–backup {Backup all files contained in the userhome and the mailspool-file to
a file named /$user.tar.bz2 or /$user.tar.gz.}

–backup-to {Place the backup files not in / but in the directory specified by
this parameter. This implicitly sets –backup also.}

–remove-home {Remove the home directory of the user and its mailspool.
If –backup is specified, the files are deleted after having performed the backup.
}

–remove-all-files {Remove all files from the system owned by this user.
Note: –remove-home does not have an effect any more. If –backup is specified,
the files are deleted after having performed the backup.}

–version {Display version and copyright information.}

(Source: man page)

How to fully delete a user on Debian 10 Buster

To remove a user keeping his home directory as instructed in the man above, run:

# sudo deluser linuxhintuser

You can check the home directory is still there by running an ls on the /home directory:

# ls /home

You can add the option –remove-home before the username to remove the home directory too:

# sudo deluser –remove-home linuxhintuser

A new ls on the /home directory will show this time the home directory was removed together with the user linuxhintuser:

# ls /home

About sudo

The command sudo allows regular unprivileged users to run command as root, sudo means “super user do”. Users with sudo privileges can run commands allowed within the file /etc/sudoers, of which below you can see a sample:

In this default configuration the following lines show full rights for sudo group users:

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

The sudo command addition means increased security allowing users to use privileged rights only when necessary decreasing possibility to run any privileged command by mistake.

I hope you found this brief tutorial showing How to Create a New Sudo User on Debian 10 Buster useful, thank you for reading it .