How To Edit the Sudoers File Safely

Awesome wrote up Justin! Very handy. Thank you!

bookmarking for ever… Absolute beginner and found it awesome…

absolute not useful! a lot of divagations, but again telling what do do instead HOW to do. beginners need to find HOW the fuck to do it!

@castleless: Sorry you feel that way! This article is trying to provide background material to help people understand the commands. Maybe something like the initial server setup guide is more your speed:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-14-04

If you want to add sudo privileges for a user named “myuser”, run the command:

<pre> visudo </pre>

Then add the following line to the file:

<pre> myuser ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL </pre>

Done!

Never mind how to do it differently; how to do it the original way before you change it would be more helpful.

So to recap… add

Then on nano as visudo,

``` to writeout and save the file /etc/sudoers.tmp

And it's this sudoers.tmp file which is read by sudo as the config file?

Using a tmp file as a config file is a bit counter-intuitive. Does visudo rename it when it's saved?

Answering my own question, that does seem to be the case. So never mind the name of the file, just do it... :/

@rshpeley: visudo ensures that you don’t leave /etc/sudoers in a broken state. It’s saved to the temp file, checked for errors, then renamed.

I found this really helpful actually. Thanks Justin, much appreciated!

Maybe I’m on a later version of Ubuntu since this was written, but it looks like the current config advises using an extra file to add user settings to sudoers.

Is it now correct to uncomment the last line of sudoers #includedir /etc/sudoers.d then add a file in the etc/sudeors.d/ containing your additions?

Also, do I need to restart anything for the changes to take affect?

Hi, Very helpful article. By the way, how can we add an ldap user (normal user) to the sudoer’s file?