Adding a New User
It is not recommended only to have a root
user on your server, thus we will set up a new user account.
The process is fairly straightforward:
adduser username
Provide a secure password, and your new user account is created.
We will want occasional higher privileges:
usermod -aG sudo username
And you are done! Read the Securing Your Instance guide for increased security.
SSH login with a new username
Next, we will allow the newly created. Go to the new User's folder and create .ssh
folder and authorized_keys
file, and change its file permissions:
cd /home/<username>
mkdir .ssh
chmod 700 .ssh
touch .ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
chown -R <username>:<username> .ssh
To authenticate the new user, you will need to copy the public key corresponding to the user:
echo "<PUBLIC_KEY_LINE" >> .ssh/authorized_keys
You can now login from your workstation:
ssh <username>@<server_ip>
Alternatively, you can copy the entire authorized_keys
file from the root
user:
cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys /home/<username>/.ssh/
Make sure to give an ownership of .ssh
folder to <username>
:
chown -R <username>:<username> .ssh
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