How To Connect to Your New DigitalOcean Droplet

We’ve just provisioned a new Ubuntu 24.04 LTS droplet in Digital Ocean. What to do next?

When creating a new droplet in DigitalOcean, we must provide our public SSH key. DigitalOcean places this key in the new droplet. This way we can securely connect to the VM from our local machine.

If we don’t have a key, we must create one using the ssh-keygen command.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519

We can also include an email.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "my_email@my_domain"

We will copy and paste our public key into the Add public SSH key box

and hit the Create Droplet button at the bottom of the page. That’s it. In less than a minute, we can securely log in to the VM.

Connecting to the Virtual Machine as root

Once the VM is up and running, we can try to connect to it. Note that we need to use the root account.

ssh -i private_ssh_key root@droplet_ip_address

Where:

• private_ssh_key is the private key that we created (ssh-keygen command) and added to the VM
• droplet_ip_address is the IPv4 public address assigned to the VM

Creating a new user

We have used the root account until now. Since we are concerned about fundamental security hygiene, we need to create a new user account. Let’s add a new user, for example, mick, using the adduser command.

adduser mick

Next, we will answer a few questions (including a password) and a new account will be created.

info: Adding user `mick'...
info: Selecting UID/GID from range 1000 to 59999 ...
info: Adding new group `mick' (1001) ...
info: Adding new user `mick' (1001) with group `mick (1001)'...
info: Creating home directory `/home/mick'...
info: Copying files from `/etc/skel'...
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for mick
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
    Full name []: mick
    Room Number []:
    Work Phone []:
    Home Phone []:
    Other []:
Is the information correct? [Y/n] y
info: Adding new user `mick' to supplemental / extra groups `users'...
info: Adding user `mick' to group `users'...

Since we plan to use the new account with the sudo capabilities, we must add it to the sudo group.

usermod -aG sudo mick

Where:

• usermod is a command to modify user
• -aG adds the user to a new group
• sudo is a destination group for the user mick
• mick is the account (user) name that we add to the sudo group

Testing new settings

We will switch to the new account and verify whether the new user, mick, has sudo privileges.

su - mick

To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

mick@ubuntu-lab1:~$

Once we switch to the mick user, we can verify if mick can, for example, list files in a directory owned by root.

sudo ls -la /root

The results look promissing.

[sudo] password for mick:
total 40
drwx------  5 root root 4096 Mar  5 06:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Mar  5 07:00 ..
-rw-------  1 root root  167 Mar  5 06:36 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 3106 Apr 22  2024 .bashrc
drwx------  2 root root 4096 Mar  5 06:07 .cache
. . .

We can list files in the /root directory. We’ve just confirmed that mick can execute commands with sudo privileges.

What’s next?

So far, we have logged into the machine as root using a pre-defined SSH key. However, our goal is not to use the root account for logging. The goal is to log in as a user mick using its own SSH key.

We need to configure the system so that mick can use his own SSH key to log in to the VM.

Configuring SSH for mick’s account

The first step is to create a hidden .ssh directory in mick’s home directory (/home/mick/.ssh/). We will keep mick’s SSH config files and public SSH keys in this directory.

mkdir ~/.ssh

Note that the ~/ resolves to the mick home directory.

In the .ssh directory, we need to create the file authorized_keys and place the mick public SSH key in it.

touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Next, we copy the content of the public ssh key file we created on our local machine and paste it into the authorized_keys file. Then, we save and close the file.

Verifying remote ssh login

In the last step, we verify whether we can log in from our local machine to our VM using mick SSH credentials.

ssh -i <mick_prv_ssh_key> mick@<vm-ip-address>

Where:

• -i tells the SSH command what private key we are using to connect
• mick_prv_ssh_key is the path to the SSH private key for the mick user
• mick is the Linux account name (user) on our VM
• vm-ip-address is the public IPv4 address DigitalOcean assigned to our VM

If everything goes according to plan and we configure everything correctly, we log in to our VM as mick.

Welcome to Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.0-55-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/pro

 System information as of Thu Mar  6 16:50:38 UTC 2025
. . .
mick@ubuntu-lab1:~$