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itsadok
Asked: 2013-01-10 22:24:31 +0800 CST

Enable passwordless sudo as a specific user

  • 772

I have two users on my system: itsadok, my main user, and elasticsearch, a user with a different ulimit for running ElasticSearch.

I would like to be able to run stuff as the secondary user without being prompted for password every time.

I added the following line to /etc/sudoers:

itsadok ALL=(elasticsearch:elasticsearch) NOPASSWD: ALL

The way I understand it, this should allow the user itsadok, on any host, to run any command as (user or group) elasticsearch without a password. However, trying something like

itsadok@dev001$ sudo -u elasticsearch ls

prompts me for a password. Restarting the machine did not help.

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE:

It turns our that the order of lines in sudoers is significant. I placed the line under "User privilege specification" which sounded like the right place, but the line for the %admin group that comes later was overriding the setting.

Putting the same line at the end of the sudoers file fixed the issue.

sudo

3 Answers

  1. Follow these steps:

    1. Edit sudoers file (this can be present in /etc/sudoers.d/file_name) 
    sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers
    1. Add line at the end of the file 
    usernameusedforlogin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
    1. Save file 
    esc :wq!
    • 18
  2. Best Answer

    Revised answer from comments: If you place directives below #includedir, they are ignored. Move the line next to the sudo or admingroup definitions, or place it in separate file in /etc/sudoers.d/.

    • 12

  3. Alternately you can use python pudo package: https://pypi.org/project/pudo/1.0.0/

    Installation:

    user$ sudo -H pip3 install pudo # you can install using pip2 also

    Below is the code snippit for using in python automation for running cmds under root privilege::

    user$ python3 # or python2
>>> import pudo
>>> (ret, out) = pudo.run(('ls', '/root')) # or pudo.run('ls /root')
>>> print(ret)
>>> 0
>>> print(out)
>>> b'Desktop\nDownloads\nPictures\nMusic\n'

    Below is the cmd example for running cmds under root privilege

    user$ pudo ls /root
Desktop  Downloads  Pictures  Music
    • 0