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running sudo commands without password on VPS

what i learned

you can configure your VPS / server to be able to run sudo commands without being asked for your password. you just need to create a sudoers file.

  • first you have to create sudoers file 

    sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/$USER

    when i asked chatgpt for this i found you can just run sudo visudo and it’ll open the sudoers file.

  • now, let’s say you have a user app that you want to be able to run apt update and apt upgrade without asking for sudo password. you need to add this line to your sudoers file 

    app ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/apt update, /usr/bin/apt upgrade

how it works

  1. app - the username on the system
  2. ALL=(ALL) - this means this rule to all hosts and allows acting as any user
  3. NOPASSWD - no password
  4. /usr/bin/apt update - you must pass the full path for the commands you want to run without a password.

how i learned

i recently found a tweet explaining all of this but i learned about it when setting a github action to push some code to my raspberry pi 5 running a FastAPI app and restarting the service. i needed to restart it using sudo but the github action would fail if prompted for it, i needed to run it without being asked for my password.

reference

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