Adding sudoers

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A file can be added for groups of users or specific users to /etc/sudoers.d/ directory. This line would make someone a sudoer with no password requirement.

jsmith ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

If you want the user to type a password.

jsmith ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Updating sudoers file safely

  • Last checked on Ubuntu 16.04.01 LTS (xenial)

The command visudo checks the validity of the sudoers file before making the actual update to the file, and this is the recommended way of editing the file because one can potentially lose sudo privileges unintentionally.

$ sudo visudo

Instead editing /etc/sudoers file I usually create a file at /etc/sudoers.d/localusers so I edit that instead.

$ sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/localusers

Changing the default editor used for visudo

I’m a VIM user, but many of the distros default to nano for newcomers to Linux systems. You can use the following command to change the default editor that is loaded for visudo and for many other apps.

$ sudo update-alternatives --config editor