How To Grant And Remove Sudo Privileges To Users On Ubuntu

As you already know, with sudo privileges, we can perform any administrative tasks on Ubuntu systems. When creating a new users on your Linux box, they can't do any administrative tasks until you make them to be a member of 'sudo' group. In this brief tutorial, let us see how to add a regular user to sudo group and remove the given privileges to make it as just a normal user.

Grant Sudo Privileges To A regular User On Linux

Usually, we use 'adduser' command to create new user like below.

$ sudo adduser ostechnix

If you want the newly created user to perform any administrative tasks with sudo, just add him to the sudo group using command:

$ sudo usermod -a -G sudo ostechnix

The above command will make the user called 'ostechnix' to be the member of sudo group.

You can also use this command to add the users to sudo group.

$ sudo adduser ostechnix sudo

Now, log out and log back in to apply the changes. From now on, the user can perform administrative tasks with sudo privilege.

To verify it, just use 'sudo' as prefix in a any command.

$ sudo mkdir /test
[sudo] password for ostechnix:

Remove sudo privileges of an User

Sometimes, you might want to remove sudo privileges to a particular user without deleting it from your Linux box. To make any user as a normal user, just remove them from the sudo group.

Say for example If you want to remove a user called ostechnix, from the sudo group, just run:

$ sudo deluser ostechnix sudo

Sample output:

Removing user `ostechnix' from group `sudo' ...
Done.

This command will only remove user 'ostechnix' from the sudo group, but it will not delete the user permanently from the system.  Now, He becomes a regular user and can't do any administrative tasks as sudo user.

Also, you can use the following command to revoke the sudo access from an user:

$ sudo gpasswd -d ostechnix sudo

Please be careful while removing users from the sudo group. Do not remove the real administrator from the "sudo" group.

Verify the user "ostechnix" has been really removed from sudo group using command:

$ sudo -l -U ostechnix
User ostechnix is not allowed to run sudo on ubuntuserver.

Yes, the user "ostechnix" has been removed from sudo group, and he can't execute any administrative tasks.

Please be careful while removing a user from a sudo group. If you have only one sudo user on your system and you remove him from the sudo group, you can't perform any administrative tasks such as installing, removing and updating programs on your system. So, please be careful!

In our next tutorial, we will explain how to restore sudo privileges to a user.

• How To Restore Sudo Privileges To A User

Suggested read:

• How To Change Default Sudo Log File In Linux
• How To Find All Sudo Users In Your Linux System
• How To Run Particular Commands Without Sudo Password In Linux
• How to force users to use root password instead of their own password when using sudo