How to allow sudo without a password

Published: 03 Jan 2013

Suppose you’re setting up an automated task or something similar and it would be nice not to worry about entering a password for sudo.

Here’s how to allow sudo without a password for a specific user (tested on Ubuntu 11.10):

sudo visudo
add the following line at the end of the file: someuser ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL and exit
now test with something like sudo ls and you should not get prompted for a password

For completeness, here’s what the sudoers file should look like (Ubuntu 11.10) when your done with the edit above:

# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#

Defaults

env_reset

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

shane ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

Tags: #sudo#linux#how-to