Create an administrator user in Drupal using Drush (Drupal 10 & 11)

In otder to create a new user in your website using drush, you'll need to run the following commands:

$ drush user-create YourUsername --mail="your@mail.com" --password="YourPassword"

This will create a new user in the website.

In order to assign the role administrator to the user run:

$ drush user-add-role "administrator" YourUsername

Updated for Drupal 11 (2026)

If you need to create a new administrator account in Drupal using Drush, you can do it quickly and safely from the command line. This is especially useful if you are locked out of your site or setting up a new environment.

The following commands work for Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 with modern Drush versions (Drush 10+).

Create a new user with Drush

Run the following command:

drush user:create YourUsername --mail="your@mail.com" --password="YourPassword"

This will create a new user account in your Drupal installation.

Assign administrator role

To grant administrator permissions to the user, run:

drush user:add-role administrator YourUsername

This assigns the administrator role, giving full access to the Drupal backend.

One-liner (create admin user instantly)

If you want to do everything in one step:

drush user:create admin --mail="admin@example.com" --password="StrongPass123" && drush user:add-role administrator admin

Important notes

• Modern Drush versions use colon syntax (user:create instead of user-create).
• The role name administrator must exist on your site.
• You can list available roles with:

drush role:list

• On some installations, the admin role may have a different name.

Common use cases

• Recovering access to a locked Drupal site
• Creating admin users in local environments (DDEV, Docker)
• Setting up staging or production environments
• Automating deployments

Related Drush commands for user management

Reset user password

drush user:password username newpassword

List users

drush user:list

Remove a role from a user

drush user:remove-role administrator username

Block a user

drush user:block username

Troubleshooting

The administrator role does not exist

Check available roles using:

drush role:list

If the role is missing, you may need to create it or assign permissions manually.

Command not found

Make sure Drush is installed and available:

drush status

Permissions not applied

Verify that the role actually has administrative permissions in your Drupal installation.

Conclusion

Using Drush to create and manage users in Drupal is fast, reliable, and essential for developers and administrators. Whether you are recovering access or setting up a new project, these commands save time and simplify your workflow.