Sudo Password – How to Avoid Being Prompted for a Password by Sudo

You can configure sudo to never ask for your password.

Open a Terminal window and type:

sudo visudo

In the bottom of the file, add the following line:

$USER ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

Where $USER is your username on your system. Save and close the sudoers file (if you haven't changed your default terminal editor (you'll know if you have), press Ctl + x to exit nano and it'll prompt you to save).

As of Ubuntu 19.04, the file should now look something like

#
# 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
Defaults    mail_badpass
Defaults    secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin"

# 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

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

YOUR_USERNAME_HERE ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

After this you can type sudo <whatever you want> in a Terminal window without being prompted for the password.

This only applies, to using the sudo command in the terminal. You'll still be prompted for your password if you (for example) try to install a package from the software center

Use the NOPASSWD directive

You can use the NOPASSWD directive in your /etc/sudoers file.

If your user is called user and your host is called host you could add these lines to /etc/sudoers:

user host = (root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/shutdown
user host = (root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/reboot

This will allow the user user to run the desired commands on host without entering a password. All other sudoed commands will still require a password.

The commands specified in the sudoers file must be fully qualified (i.e. using the absolute path to the command to run) as described in the sudoers man page. Providing a relative path is considered a syntax error.

If the command ends with a trailing / character and points to a directory, the user will be able to run any command in that directory (but not in any sub-directories therein). In the following example, the user user can run any command in the directory /home/someuser/bin/:

user host = (root) NOPASSWD: /home/someuser/bin/

Note: Always use the command visudo to edit the sudoers file to make sure you do not lock yourself out of the system – just in case you accidentally write something incorrect to the sudoers file. visudo will save your modified file to a temporary location and will only overwrite the real sudoers file if the modified file can be parsed without errors.

Using /etc/sudoers.d instead of modifying /etc/sudoers

As an alternative to editing the /etc/sudoers file, you could add the two lines to a new file in /etc/sudoers.d e.g. /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown. This is an elegant way of separating different changes to the sudo rights and also leaves the original sudoers file untouched for easier upgrades.

Note: Again, you should use the command visudo to edit the file to make sure you do not lock yourself out of the system:

sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown 

This also automatically ensures that the owner and permissions of the new file is set correctly.

If sudoers is messed up

If you did not use visudo to edit your files and then accidentally messed up /etc/sudoers or messed up a file in /etc/sudoers.d then you will be locked out of sudo.

The solution could be to fix the files using pkexec which is an alternative to sudo.

To fix /etc/sudoers:

pkexec visudo

To fix /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown:

pkexec visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown

If the ownership and/or permissions are incorrect for any sudoers file, the file will be ignored by sudo so you might also find yourself locked out in this situation. Again, you can use pkexec to fix this.

The correct permissions should be like this:

$ ls -l /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown 
-r--r----- 1 root root 86 Jul 16 15:37 /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown

Use pkexec like this to fix ownership and permissions:

pkexec chown root:root /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown
pkexec chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers.d/shutdown