Best Practice for a Sudo Developer User?

I'm a solo web designer/developer and I'm looking to use a Centmin Mod VPS for my own production hosting. I'd like to work with permissions similar to those provisioned by ServerPilot and RunCloud, where a sudo user has enough access to read logs, restart services, and SSH files to multiple web apps under a single account.

Presently, I'm doing everything as root and I'm 98% sure that's a horrific idea. It makes it easy to SSH into /home/nginx and `git clone` projects into centmin-created virtual hosts, but I also need to `chown nginx:nginx` everything I check out and using root is a bit strong for eventual CI/CD setups that'll use SSH to pull stuff automatically. I don't use the SFTP accounts and I only use keys for authentication.

I don't need to grant multiple people access, I'd just like to end up with a fairly flexible user for SSH and managing web projects that isn't root. (Unless I'm wrong and I should just get comfortable with that.)

I'll have a decent understanding of how permissions and groups work, but I'm not sure how I might go about setting up such a user or what to look out for. I know from experience that I'm likely to get a few things wrong and SSH files that aren't owned properly, etc.

You have my gratitude if you've made it to the end of this verbose post. Any suggestions or criticisms are entirely welcome!

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Thank you, @eva2000. I'm running 123.09beta01 and missed the sudo users tool. I've avoided using the individual vhost users because it'd mean managing significantly more credentials as I'm staging+changing apps frequently. I also SSH and git pull files only and rarely FTP anything around.

Sounds like it'd be best to just add a sudo user, work primarily with that day to day, and be mindful of permissions within /home/nginx/. Works for me!

 

I apologize if I'm being daft @eva2000, but am I wrong to expect that tools/addsudousers.sh should create the system user and make that user a sudoer?

When I run

Code:

/usr/local/src/centminmod/tools/addsudousers.sh foo

(123.09beta01), there is no output and seemingly no activity. I presume that's because of the check for /etc/sudoers.d, which doesn't exist on my system.

 

CentOS 7.5.1804

 

That did it, thanks @eva2000!

It's a RamNode 2GB OpenVZ server I provisioned on 9/30/18 with CentOS 7 x86_64 Minimal. The Centmin Mod install also took a really long time (I forget how many seconds), so I'm guessing this is all because I chose that "minimal" variant.

 

Ah, thanks! Looks like it wasn't that bad...

Code:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Curl Installer YUM or DNF Time: 304.5017 seconds
Total YUM Time: 27.878996513 seconds
Total YUM or DNF + Source Download Time: 81.5366
Total Nginx First Time Install Time: 808.2832
Total PHP First Time Install Time: 788.1609
Download Zip From Github Time: 0.0000
Total Time Other eg. source compiles: 676.1986
Total Centmin Mod Install Time: 2354.1794
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Install Time (curl yum + cm install + zip download): 2658.6811 seconds
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz
2 2400.147
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

@eva2000 I used betainstaller72.sh, and in hindsight it's looking like I was just impatient. I'd already seen some install times people shared around here from much beefier machines.

 

Thanks @eva2000! Your comments are both helpful and reassuring.