In this article I’ll set up the sudo system on Debian. By default the Debian installer only sets up sudo if you don’t supply a root password at install time. You don’t need sudo on a machine to to use it effectively and I have used Debian machines without it for years. The problem is online instructions nearly all use sudo and it becomes tiresome removing it from the start of all the instructions.
Adding and configuring sudo is easy, simply install the sudo package:
# apt install sudo
And then add yourself and or other users to the sudo group:
adduser username sudo
You need to log out and back in to have this change take effect as groups are only enumerated at log in. You can test that sudo is working by running any command with sudo such as ls.
$ sudo ls