Adding a user to sudoers

Mirek Jahoda, Ankur Sinha, The Fedora Docs Team Version F38 Last review: 2023-08-06

One of the most common operations that administrators want to accomplish when managing sudo permissions is to grant a new user general sudo access. This is helpful if you want to give an account full administrative access to the system.

Giving a user sudo privileges

On Fedora, it is the wheel group the user has to be added to, as this group has full admin privileges. Add a user to the group using the following command:

$ sudo usermod -aG wheel username

If adding the user to the group does not work immediately, you may have to edit the /etc/sudoers file to uncomment the line with the group name:

$ sudo visudo
...
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
...

You will need to logout and back in for changes to take effect.