Basics: Guidance for newbies » Setting up a "site admin" role
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For improved security you should not use the main administrator account (user 1) on a day-to-day basis. Instead, you should create a “site admin” role for your personal account.
Option of using the Admin Role module to maintain full permissions for the site admin role automatically as new modules are installed, and/or tip about using Web Developer toolbar’s Forms > Populate Form Fields feature to automatically check all permissions for the site admin role.
Hi, just browsing your Drupal articles: they’r Goooooddd!!
Just one question, though: you write: “For improved security you should not use the main administrator account (user 1) on a day-to-day basis.” Why is that? There will always be a user 1, and if the password of another user with admin rights is hacked, then so could the password of user 1. I mean, what’s the added security of not using user 1?
Hi Ludo, thanks for the compliment :)
I’ll look up some links and info to give further details about this. A few things to note though… no other user besides UID 1 has true “admin rights”. No other user but UID 1 can do certain Drupal admin tasks. For instance you cannot make UID 2 equal to UID 1. I’m not a Drupal developer/coder so I don’t know/recall the distinctions off the top of my head, but I’ll look into it.
Secondly, there is always a risk of things like “cookie hijacking” or “session hijacking” as well as tricks/malicious links which if a logged-in admin follows could allow an attacker access. I don’t know if Drupal is currently susceptible to these things, though it’s always been common practice with scripts in general to be careful with the “super admin” account. This actually did happen to me on a non-Drupal CMS in the past (fortunately it was a friend who discovered the flaw and told me about it… otherwise an “unkind” person could have logged into the site as me and had completely unrestricted access). Drupal core may be more impervious to such things, but adding on contributed modules introduces many new possibilities for insecurities, so better safe than sorry. I’ll look up further details and get back to you.
I can think of 2 reasons to not to use the UID1 super user account except for when absolutely necessary.
When you set things up and working while logged in as UID1, stuff works. I test the operation of my site with logins from all the different roles to see if the permissions are set correctly.
If you make a mistake while logged in as UID1 there is a greater risk of a disaster than when logged in with a user ID with fewer permissions.