Daily user

Create a user without admin rights for the agents, give it your SSH key and Herdr, and switch your shortcut to it.

Coding agents run shell commands. As root, one wrong command can change the whole system. A normal user can only change its own files, so you log in as that user every day and keep root for the rare admin task.

This guide calls the user developer. It gets no password and no sudo rights.

Create the user

On the server, as root:

adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" developer

Give it your SSH key

Run this on your laptop. It sends your public key through the root connection and installs it for developer.

cat ~/.ssh/hostinger-herdr.pub | ssh agent-cloud 'install -d -m 700 -o developer -g developer /home/developer/.ssh && cat >> /home/developer/.ssh/authorized_keys && chown developer:developer /home/developer/.ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 600 /home/developer/.ssh/authorized_keys'

Give it Herdr

The template installs Herdr for root only. Copy the same binary into the user's ~/.local/bin. Run this on the server, as root:

install -d -o developer -g developer /home/developer/.local /home/developer/.local/bin
install -m 755 -o developer -g developer "$(command -v herdr)" /home/developer/.local/bin/herdr

Both ~/.local and ~/.local/bin must belong to developer. If root owns ~/.local, the Claude Code installer on the next pages fails when it tries to create ~/.local/state.

Switch your shortcut

In ~/.ssh/config on your laptop, change User root to User developer. Open the file in your code editor, the same way as on the previous page.

~/.ssh/config

Host agent-cloud
  HostName <VPS_IPV4>
  User developer
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/hostinger-herdr
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  ForwardAgent no
  ServerAliveInterval 30

For admin work, such as installing a system package, connect as root explicitly with ssh root@agent-cloud, or use the hPanel web console. From a root session, su - developer switches back to the daily user.

Check

ssh agent-cloud
whoami
# developer

herdr --version
# herdr 0.9.1