Archlinux swap sudo with doas

Why consider switching

As there are many known issues with sudo it is wise to switch to something that is not bloat or has little or no known issues. In this case opendoas is the best choice.

Installation

doas is available in the AUR (Arch User Repository). There are following ways to install:

• AUR helper
• Make from git repo

In this case we are directly going to install it with the help of an AUR helper like paru or yay. Run the following command from the commandline:

$ paru -S doas

Install it normally and continue.

Setup

doas is already installed, now you need to set it up. Edit /etc/doas.conf with your text editor of choice, in my case it’s neovim

$ sudo nvim /etc/doas.conf

doas could be configured in many ways but the most simple one is to permit the wheel group which is most commonly used.

# /etc/doas.conf
# uncomment/add either one of them based upon your liking

permit :wheel # with password confirmation
permit nopass :wheel # remove password confirmation

Removing sudo

Congratulations, now you have successfully installed and setup doas. So now you can remove sudo because an alternative is present. But it could lead to some issues and we will see how to fix them. First let’s remove sudo.

$ sudo pacman -R sudo

Our system is now cleansed from the evil of sudo. But there are programs that require sudo to be installed in the system to work properly. We are going to trick them to use doas instead of sudo.

$ which sudo
zsh: command sudo not found
$ ln -s /usr/bin/doas /usr/bin/sudo
$ which sudo
/usr/bin/sudo

What we did is checked the location where sudo is installed, as we recently uninstalled it, it was not found in our system. We made a symbolic link of /usr/bin/doas to /usr/bin/sudo so we can have doas to be called whenever some program calls sudo. This is to prevent many issues with the programs in the future.

Resources

This article is available in the video form, check it out here.