Launching Your First Droplet

Droplets are DigitalOcean’s virtual private servers: a Linux machine of your chosen size, in your chosen region, running an image you pick. Everything else on the platform either runs on one or talks to one, so this is the guide to start with.

You can create a Droplet from the control panel or from the command line. Both produce the same machine. The control panel is the better way to see the options; the command line is the better way to repeat yourself.

Create a Droplet in the Control Panel

Open the control panel, click Create and choose Droplets. The create page walks through the decisions in order:

1. Region. Pick the datacenter closest to the people who will use the machine. Latency is decided here and the region cannot be changed afterwards.
2. Image. Choose an operating system such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, a prebuilt Marketplace image, or one of your own custom images or snapshots.
3. Size. Choose a plan. Basic shares CPU with other Droplets and is the cheapest; General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, Memory-Optimized and Storage-Optimized give you dedicated resources weighted differently.
4. Authentication. Choose an SSH key or a password. Use an SSH key: it is both more secure and less friction every time you connect.
5. Finalize. Set how many Droplets to create, give the Droplet a hostname, add any tags and assign it to a project. Then click Create Droplet.

Two options are worth knowing about before you commit. Backups can be enabled at creation time and run weekly or daily. And clearing both the public IPv4 and public IPv6 options creates a Droplet with no public address at all, reachable only from inside your VPC.

Create a Droplet From the Command Line

The same Droplet can be created with doctl, the DigitalOcean command-line tool. Install it, create a personal access token, and authenticate:

doctl auth init

A create command needs three things: a size, an image and a region.

doctl compute droplet create example-droplet --size s-2vcpu-2gb --image ubuntu-24-04-x64 --region nyc1

If you are not sure what to pass, each of those has a matching list command that prints the valid values:

• doctl compute size list
• doctl compute image list --public
• doctl compute region list

Log In to Your Droplet

Creation takes under a minute. When the Droplet is ready, its public IP address appears on the Droplets page, and you can list them from the command line:

doctl compute droplet list

Connect over SSH as root, using the key you chose at creation:

ssh root@your_droplet_ip

From here the machine is yours. A sensible next step is to create a non-root user with sudo access and stop logging in as root, then point a domain at the Droplet so people can reach it by name rather than by IP address.