Add Your Account as a Sudoer on Mac

Published: Apr 17, 2019 • Updated: May 3, 2021

With great power comes great responsibility.

1. Run whoami. You will use this value later to replace <YOUR_ACCOUNT>

2. Switch to an admin account by running

    su <ADMIN_ACCOUNT>
   

3. Run sudo cat /etc/sudoers and verify that the following line exists somewhere in that file ¹

    #includedir /private/etc/sudoers.d
   

4. Use visudo ² to create a new sudoers file ³ by running

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

5. Press the i key for Insert mode, then type the following line

    <YOUR_ACCOUNT> ALL=(ALL) ALL
   

6. Press ESC, then type :x followed by the ENTER key to save your changes

7. Verify your changes by running

    sudo cat /etc/sudoers.d/sudoers
   

8. Run exit to logout of the admin account and return to your account

9. Test your sudo access by running a simple command, such as

    sudo echo "hello world"
   

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1. On Mac, /etc is a symlink to /private/etc ↩︎

2. To learn more about this command, type info visudo into Terminal and read up ↩︎

3. We’re creating a new sudoers file instead of editing the existing one at /etc/sudoers because this is a best practice. For more info see this stackoverflow thread ↩︎