MacOS – Enable sudo without a password on MacOS

macospasswordsudo

My Problem

I would like to be able to run sudo commands on MacOS Sierra 10.12 without having to type a password.

What have I tried

I've read the following:

Why does sudo ask for a password in terminal?
allow sudo to another user without password
Use sudo Without a Password on Your Mac

And changed the relevant part of my /etc/sudoers file to:

root ALL=(ALL) ALL
%admin  ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
%sudo   ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
adamatan ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

My local user id (whoami) is adamatan.

I'm still being asked to type a password every few minutes when calling sudo. Any idea what's wrong?

Best Answer

Open a terminal, run sudo visudo

Edit the line:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

To say:

%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Now, you should now be able to run sudo without password.

Related Solutions

Mac – Help! Lost admin password for Mac OS X server 10.9

In conclusion, TimeMachine recovery of the entire system to the status before changing admin password worked well. I recovered the old admin password and it worked for Keychain Access as well.

In details; Just in case the recovery doesn't work and I lose the TimeMachine backups somehow, I copied the TimeMachine backup to another external drive. To do that, however, I needed admin password. So, first I had to reset the admin password.

Note: In my case, the destination for TimeMachine backup was a local partition (probably), so I didn't need network password to access it. If it were in network, for example, you would need password that has been lost at step 8. Then this procedure may not work for you. Before actually try the following steps, it may be good to see if you need password for system recovery, following http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14185 (step 5 in this page is the key), but just cancel when you are asked to choose date and time.

Open the Time Machine pane in System Preferences. Choose Time Machine > Open Time Machine Preferences…
Slide the Time Machine switch to Off.
Restart the Mac with Command + R keys held down to enter Recovery Mode.
In Recovery Mode, launch Terminal.app.
In Terminal.app, type resetpassword.
Choose the admin account and set new password. Verify it.
Warning about Keychain will appear.
Restart. Now you get admin password at the cost of loosing Keychain password. The server won't work properly any longer.
The OS will ask if you want to update Keychain password. Because you don't know the old password. You can't do that. So just choose Continue in the middle.
The system will ask Keychain passwords, but you have to ignore them.
Connect an external drive that is large enough.
If necessary, reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). see http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5096
Click the icon of the new backup drive and choose Get Info from the File menu or press Command-I (⌘-I)
Make sure Ignore ownership on this volume at the bottom of the Sharing & Permissions: section is not checked.
Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the current backup drive.
Open a new Finder window. In the Finder sidebar, click the icon of the new backup drive.
Drag the folder Backups.backupdb on the current backup drive to the root level of the new backup drive.
Enter an administrator name and password (you needed to reset the admin password for this step), then click OK to start the copying process. This may take some time to complete because all the backups will be copied.
After the copy has completed, you can eject the eternal drive.
Restart the machine with Command and R keys held down to enter Recovery Mode.
In Recovery Mode, Select Restore from a Time Machine Backup, then click Continue.
Select the TimeMachine storage.
Select the date and time of the backup you want to restore, then follow the onscreen instructions.
In my case, I successfully recovered admin password as well as default Keychain password.

MacOS – Confusion with sudo and multiple local accounts

You aren't carrying forward your shell environment into the su adm session. so if you echo $PATH in the usracc account and the adm account, you'll find that they aren't equal (which is why adm can't find the updatedb command). All you need to do is tell su that you want to carry forward your env (su -m adm should do it) or just add the path to updatedb.

Though on my box updatedb is called /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb and is a script.