How to use Sudo command without being prompted for password
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If you find yourself using the sudo command a lot and are tired of typing your password constantly, you can make the password prompt go away by editting a single line in one configuration file.
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Edit the sudoers file
Sudo configuration is done via the /etc/sudoers file. However you should never edit this file directly (e.g. nano /etc/sudoers) and instead use this command to do it:
sudo visudo
Editting this file with visudo instead of other text editors parses the file for syntax errors, only saving the changes if the check passes and preventing a save if the check fails, and it also locks the file while it’s being editted. (Important for systems with multiple administrators, while one is editting the file another cannot.)
The sudoers file will look something like this:
# 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
There’s two ways to disable the password prompt.
Disable password prompt for a specific user
Use sudo visudo and add the following line to /etc/sudoers file:
user ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
This affects only the specific user, other users with sudo privileges will still get a password prompt when using it.
Disable password prompt for all sudoers
Use sudo visudo and edit the %sudo line in /etc/sudoers file:
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
This affects all users, so no one will get a password prompt when using sudo. Be careful doing this on systems with more than one administrator.
After editing /etc/sudoers, you can double-check that the syntax is OK and you didn’t break anything with the command visudo -c, you should get output like the below:
❯ visudo -c
/etc/sudoers: parsed OK
/etc/sudoers.d/README: parsed OK
