Add Your Account as a Sudoer on Mac

Published: Apr 17, 2019
Updated: Oct 16, 2022

With great power comes great responsibility.

– Uncle Ben

Run whoami. You will use this value later to replace <YOUR_ACCOUNT>
Switch to an admin account by running
```
 su <ADMIN_ACCOUNT>
```
Run sudo cat /etc/sudoers and verify that the following line exists somewhere in that file ¹
```
 #includedir /private/etc/sudoers.d
```
Use visudo ² to create a new sudoers file ³ by running
```
 sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/sudoers
```
Press the i key for Insert mode, then type the following line
```
 <YOUR_ACCOUNT> ALL=(ALL) ALL
```
Press ESC, then type :x followed by the ENTER key to save your changes
Verify your changes by running
```
 sudo cat /etc/sudoers.d/sudoers
```
Run exit to logout of the admin account and return to your account
Test your sudo access by running a simple command, such as
```
 sudo echo "hello world"
```

On Mac, /etc is a symlink to /private/etc ↩︎
To learn more about this command, type info visudo into Terminal and read up ↩︎
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 ↩︎