Using TouchID with Sudo in Terminal or iTerm

Now that I've got a mac with TouchID, I rarely use my password. It's incredible how convenient that little button is. One place I found myself still typing my password was running sudo commands in the terminal.

Here's how you can use TouchID with the terminal too!

Enabling TouchID with Sudo

First, open the /etc/pam.d/sudo in an editor with admin permissions. I had to use sudo to do this with the following command:

sudo code /etc/pam.d/sudo

Add auth sufficient pam_tid.so to the file, here's what mine looks like now:
(I only added the line with pam_tid.so on it.)

# sudo: auth account password session
auth       sufficient     pam_tid.so
auth       sufficient     pam_smartcard.so
auth       required       pam_opendirectory.so
account    required       pam_permit.so
password   required       pam_deny.so
session    required       pam_permit.so

iTerm Support

iTerm has an advanced option that you also need to set for this to work properly. Go to
Preferences ⇒ Advanced ⇒ Allow sessions to survive after logging out and back in

Change this setting to No.

Restart iTerm and try it out!

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