How to Setup and Secure a Droplet on DigitalOcean

This post is part of my DigitalOcean series — feel free to check out my other posts or read the previous one:

How to Setup and Secure a Droplet on DigitalOcean

Step-by-step guide to securing a DigitalOcean Droplet: Learn how to improve server security by configuring firewalls, user management, and…

solomou.devRichard Solomou

In the previous guide, we walked through the process of creating a DigitalOcean Droplet. If you followed those steps, you now have a virtual machine up and running, and are ready to go. In this second part of our series, we will focus on securing your Droplet to ensure it’s safe to share with the world.

Prerequisites

Before we proceed, let’s quickly recap what you need:

1. A DigitalOcean Droplet: If you haven’t set up a Droplet yet, refer to the first part of this series.
2. Basic SSH knowledge: Familiarity with SSH will come in handy for remote server access.

Step 1: Connect to Your Droplet

Before you can secure your DigitalOcean Droplet, we need to remotely access your server using SSH. First, let’s get your Droplet’s IP address by logging into your DigitalOcean dashboard. You’ll be able to see the IP right next to the droplet hostname.

Open your terminal run the following command, replacing your_vm_ip with your Droplet's IP address:

ssh root@your_vm_ip

You’ll be prompted to enter your user’s password or, if you’ve configured SSH key authentication (like you should have!), you can use your private key to log in. Once connected, you’re ready to proceed!

Step 2: Update Your Server

The first step in securing your Droplet is ensuring your server is up-to-date with the latest security patches and software updates. To do so, run the following commands:

apt update 
apt upgrade

This keeps your system protected against known vulnerabilities. You should probably log back in and run this again every now and then to make sure your system remains up-to-date.

Step 3: Configure a Firewall

A firewall is your first line of defense against unauthorized access. For this we’ll use “UFW” (Uncomplicated Firewall), which will restrict access only to the necessary ports.

In case your Droplet’s image doesn’t come with UFW pre-installed, you can install it by running this command:

apt-get install ufw

Once UFW is installed, we can enable it by running the following command:

ufw enable

This will turn on the firewall and block all incoming connections. To allow certain incoming connections, we can use the ufw allow command. For example, to allow incoming SSH connections, we would run the following command:

ufw allow OpenSSH

We can also specify the port number to allow connections on a specific port. For example, to allow HTTP connections on port 80, we would run the following command:

ufw allow 80/tcp

Once we’ve set up our firewall rules, we can verify them by running the following command:

ufw status

This will show a list of the firewall rules we’ve set up, along with the current status of the firewall.

Step 4: User Management

For added security, let’s create a new user and grant them sudo privileges. This is best practice for security, as it’s not recommended to use the root user for day-to-day tasks.

• Let’s create a new user. Replace richard with your desired username:

adduser richard

• You’ll be prompted to enter a password for the new user. Make sure to choose a strong, unique password.
• Now that we have a new user, we need to give them access to administrative tasks. To do this, we’ll add the new user to the sudo group. Run the following command, again replacing richard with your own username:

usermod -aG sudo richard

Great, now you have a dedicated user with sudo access!

Step 5: Disable Root Login and Passwords

For the rest of the guide, you can actually log in with your new user and try it out, so go ahead and do that. Just to tighten things up a bit more, we should also disable direct root login, since you no longer need it. Here’s how to do that:

• Open the SSH configuration file for editing:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

• Find the line that says PermitRootLogin yes, and change it to PermitRootLogin no. While we’re here, you might also want to find the line that says #PasswordAuthentication no, and change that to PasswordAuthentication no. This will straight-up disallow logging in with the root user at all, but also disallow logging in with passwords on any user
• Then, press Ctrl+X and type in Y at the prompt to save and exit the editor.
• To apply the changes, restart the SSH service:

sudo systemctl restart ssh

With this change, direct root login is disabled, so only your new user will be able to login to your Droplet, which adds yet another layer of security to your server.

Step 6: SSH Key Authentication

As mentioned before, SSH key authentication is a more secure method of accessing your server compared to passwords.

If you already have an SSH key for your root user that you’d like to re-use, you can run this command to copy it over to your new user:

mkdir ~/.ssh 
sudo cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

If you’d like to instead create a new SSH Key and attach it to your user, GitHub has a fantastic guide on how to do just that.

Step 7: Regular Backups

Finally, DigitalOcean has a backup feature which you should probably enable. It acts as a safety net in case something catastrophic goes wrong. It costs a tiny bit, and scales based on your droplet size, but it’s better to be safe than sorry!

Conclusion

By following these steps, you’ve taken significant measures to secure your DigitalOcean Droplet. Server security is an ongoing process, so stay vigilant, keep your software up-to-date, and regularly apply security updates.

In the next part of this series, we will explore advanced topics such as installing Docker on a droplet, creating a private Container Registry, and more.

Until next time — happy coding!