Create SUDO user in cPanel

For security you might want to disable direct SSH login as root.

First of all login as root and create an user

#useradd sshadmin

#passwd sshadmin

Now add this user to wheel group from WHM

WHM -> Security Center -> Manage Wheel Group Users

OR from command line

#usermod -G wheel sshadmin

Now open /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set

PermitRootLogin no

Restart the ssh service

/etc/init.d/sshd restart

Now you can ssh to server as user sshadmin and run the command “su -” to switch to root user.

Now the thing is that “su -” asks for root password. If you don’t want to remember the root password then you can add the user sshadmin to sudo user list. Add below lines to /etc/sudoers

sshadmin    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

Now run the command “sudo su -” and it will directly switch to user root without asking password.