How to Create a New User on Raspberry Pi?

Whatever your reason is, you may need to create a new user on Raspberry Pi
The procedure is not really intuitive for a beginner, so I will explain it in this tutorial

How to create a new user on Raspberry Pi?
To create a new user, you need to use the adduser command to define the new username and password
Then, you can add it extra permissions by adding it to a group or even allow it the sudo privilege

In this post, I will start with the reasons why you’ll probably need to create a new user, then the step-by-step procedure, and finally I’ll give you a few extra tips about users management

Feel free to use the table of contents below to go directly to the section interesting you

Why will you need to create a new user?

Let’s start by examining a few reason why you could need to create a new user on your Raspberry Pi

Security

As explain in my 17 security tips post, using the default user is not a good idea, and good reason to look how to create a new one
Many people keep using the default user on various operating systems (Administrator, root and pi)
However, I recommend disabling it if possible, and create another user with the same privileges

The pi user is one of the most brute-forced logins with root
Hackers have a list of commonly used logins and try mainly these ones
If possible, create a new user and disable the pi user to prevent this kind of attacks (I’ll show you how in the next part)

Multi users

Another good reason, is for creating several users for different permissions or persons
For example, if you use your Raspberry Pi at home as a desktop PC (check my review here if you’re interested), it’s probably a good idea to create a different username for each person that will use it

You can also create an administrator user for you (don’t name it admin), and a standard user for the person that will use the Raspberry Pi with the basic permissions

Applications

Finally, the last reason I see where you’ll need to create a new user is the installation of a new application
Some applications need a specific user to run

And you can have something similar to manage the user of an application
For examples, services like FTP, Samba or even an email server often use system users for their access

How to create a new user on Raspberry Pi?

Whatever the reason that led you here, here is how to create a new user on Raspberry Pi 🙂

Create the new user

The user creation is based on only one command: adduser

Here is how to create a new user:

• Type the following command:
  sudo adduser <username>
  For example:
  sudo adduser patrick
• You will need to answer a few questions:

$ sudo adduser pat
Adding user 'pat' ...
Adding new group'pat' (1002) …
Adding new user 'pat' (1002) with group'pat' …
Creating home directory '/home/pat' ...
Copying files from'/etc/skel' …
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for pat
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
        Full Name []: FROMAGET
        Room Number []:
        Work Phone []:
        Home Phone []:
        Other []:
Is the information correct? [Y/n]

As soon as the wizard is completed, you can log in with the new user name
But the new user will have no particular permission
We’ll see how to add them in the next paragraph

Permissions

I’m not talking here about the file permissions (maybe for another post), but about the user permissions (sudo or specific groups for example)

Add the sudo right

If you are following this tutorial to replace the pi user, you’ll probably look to add the sudo privilege to your new user
Here is how to do this:

• Type the following command:
  sudo adduser <username> sudo
  In my case:
  sudo adduser pat sudo

$ sudo adduser pat sudo
 Adding user 'pat' to group'sudo' …
 Adding user pat to group sudo
 Done.

That’s it, your new user is now allowed to user the sudo command
But there is still one difference with the pi user:

The system will ask you password each time you’ll use the command

Sudo without password

If you prefer to keep it as with the default pi user, you need to follow this procedure:

• You will need to create a new file under /etc/sudoers.d
• This file will allow the user of your choice to use sudo without password
• You can create this file in only one command:
  echo '<username> ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL' | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/010_<username>-nopasswd
  For example:
  echo 'pat ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL' | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/010_pat-nopasswd

That’s it, you can now use sudo without typing your password each time

Add the user to a group

The other thing you’ll probably need to do after creating a new user, is to add it to some groups

You can do this with the adduser command too:
sudo adduser <username> <group>

For example:
sudo adduser pat www-data

Delete a user

Once you have created your new users, you can delete the pi user (don’t forget to try the new admin user first)
You can also use this command to delete useless users on your system

Here is the command syntax:
sudo deluser --remove-home <username>
The –remove-home is optional, as the name suggests it will delete the /home/<username> folder

So, if you want to delete the pi user without deleting the home folder, type this:
sudo deluser pi

Extra tips

Before closing this post, here is a few extra tips to manage the users on Raspberry Pi

Skel

The /etc/skel is used as a template directory (skeleton)
Each time you create a new user on your system, the files in /etc/skel will be copied to the new home directory (/home/pat for example)

pi@pizero:~ $ ls -latr /etc/skel
 total 20
 -rw-r--r--   1 root root  675 May 15  2017 .profile
 -rw-r--r--   1 root root  220 May 15  2017 .bash_logout
 -rw-r--r--   1 root root 3523 Nov 13  2018 .bashrc
 drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 4096 Nov 13  2018 .
 drwxr-xr-x 106 root root 4096 Dec 12 12:25 ..

You can add new files here if you want to set each new user with custom files you create

List active users

All the users you create are stored in the /etc/passwd file
So if you want to get the complete list of all users enabled on your system, you can just type:
cat /etc/passwd

The following command will do the same thing:
getent passwd

Manage sudo permissions

And to conclude, you can manage more precisely the sudo permissions for each user on your system
In a previous part, I showed you a way to give all privileges to a specific user, but you can also edit the sudoers file to configure this as you want

Here is the command you can use to open this file:
sudo visudo

The file content looks like this:

As you can see, the root has “ALL” privileges on the system
But you can be more specific, and give only one command to a user by using the following syntax:
<username> ALL=(ALL) <command>
For example:
pat ALL=(ALL) /path/to/command

If you are interested in this topic, you can check this post on Kifarunix to get more details

Conclusion

That’s it! You now know how to create a new user on your Raspberry Pi, but also how to manage its permissions

I hope this tutorial was useful for you
If it’s the case, feel free to leave a comment below or to share it on any social network you want 🙂