Question

Setting a droplet password via API

Posted on March 18, 2023
DigitalOcean Droplets API
Asked by trent

I’m trying to create a Droplet via the API. Is there a way to set an SSH password? I would rather not use SSH keys.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• March 19, 2023

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

I don’t think that this is available out of the box, but what you could do is to pass a user_data parameter with a shell script or a ‘cloud-config’ configuration with

A string containing ‘user data’ which may be used to configure the Droplet on first boot, often a ‘cloud-config’ file or Bash script. It must be plain text and may not exceed 64 KiB in size.

Here is an example of such a Bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# Enable SSH password authentication and root login
sed -i 's/#PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i 's/#PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

# Restart SSH service
systemctl restart sshd

# Set a root password
echo "root:<your-password-here>" | chpasswd

This script will run on the initial Droplet boot up.

For the API call, you might have to convert this into 1 liner, eg:

#!/bin/bash ; sed -i 's/#PasswordAuthentication yes/PasswordAuthentication yes/g;s/#PermitRootLogin yes/PermitRootLogin yes/g' /etc/ssh/sshd_config && systemctl restart sshd && echo "root:<your-password-here>" | chpasswd

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

alexdo

Site Moderator

• March 21, 2023

Hello @trentseal

You can use Bobby’s suggestion to pass the user_data parameter to set the root password.

If you are creating a Droplet with the doctl command line tool, you can pass in the script using the --user-data-file option:

doctl compute droplet create ... --user-data-file /path/to/script

If you do not want to use user data, you can also run the script manually over SSH once the server is booted up.

I’ll still recommend using ssh-keys as it’s more secure and you can also limit the access to the droplet to certain IP addresses as an additional step to tighten up the security.

Regards