I just installed Arch. Works great. I created a new user, logged in with it and now I'm trying to install several things with pacman. But I keep getting the error: error: you cannot perform this operation unless you are root. I can use pacman with root just fine, but is there a way to allow my new user to perform these actions?
I tried logging into root and using gpasswd:
gpasswd -a jack root
but that didn't do anything.
You should read the Arch Wiki page on sudo.
sudo ("substitute user do") allows a system administrator to delegate authority to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.
You can install sudo from the repositories and then configure it to allow your user, jack, access to privileged commands by editing /etc/sudoers. Make sure you do this using the visudo command.
To give the user jack full root privileges, you would add this line:
jack ALL=(ALL) ALL
What I usually do is enable root privileges for a specific group. That way you can just add users you want root privileges to that group.
Edit /etc/sudoers with visudo and add (or comment out):
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
Then add your user to that group:
gpasswd -a jack wheel
I can use pacman with root just fine, but it there a way to allow my new user to perform these actions?
You could create your $USER, adding them to the wheel group alone:
useradd -Ng wheel --create-home --no-log-init $USER
Then update /etc/sudoers as suggested by Eric Lennartsson. But if you're looking for a programmatic approach you can instead create a file in /etc/sudoers.d like:
echo "$USER ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/dont-prompt-$USER-for-password
The method above was suggested by Boris in Ask Ubuntu and it doesn't require use of visudo at all. When using it with pacman prefix the commands with sudo like:
sudo pacman -S docker docker-compose
