Create new user on Amazon AMI and give it root access

Setup your new EC2 instance on AWS and choose Amazon AMI.

SSH to your instance using your private key

ssh -i <path-to-your-pem-file> ec2-user@<ec2-endpoint-or-ip>

Change to root

sudo su

Create new group for your user ( in this case my group name is ‘dev’ )

groupadd dev

Create new user and assign it to your recently created group

useradd -g dev dev

Give the username root access

visudo

Add this to the bottom of the file

dev     ALL=(ALL)       NOPASSWD:ALL

Delete the password for ‘dev’ user

sudo passwd dev -d

Change to the ‘dev’ user

su dev

Try run sudo su whether you can gain root privileges

sudo su

Change user back to dev and set authorized_keys for ssh

exit
mkdir ~/.ssh
vi ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod -R 700 ~/.ssh

If everything is correct, you should be able to change to root user from dev without providing any password.

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