Suhas Kashyap

Use Touch ID for sudo on a mac

January 19, 2026


Have you ever been frustrated by having to type in your password on your mac every single time in-spite of having Touch ID?

Behold, touchsudo.

A simple script that enables Touch ID control of sudo.

https://github.com/kashyap07/homebrew-touchsudo

touchsudo screenshot

See Apple's announcement on this.

Touch ID can be allowed for sudo with a configuration that persists across software updates using /etc/pam.d/sudo_local. See /etc/pam.d/sudo_local.template for details.


I've packaged this into a nice homebrew utility. See instructions within GitHub README.

The lowdown:

brew tap kashyap07/homebrew-touchsudo
brew install touchsudo

touchsudo
████████╗ ██████╗ ██╗   ██╗ ██████╗██╗  ██╗    ███████╗██╗   ██╗██████╗  ██████╗
╚══██╔══╝██╔═══██╗██║   ██║██╔════╝██║  ██║    ██╔════╝██║   ██║██╔══██╗██╔═══██╗
   ██║   ██║   ██║██║   ██║██║     ███████║    ███████╗██║   ██║██║  ██║██║   ██║
   ██║   ██║   ██║██║   ██║██║     ██╔══██║    ╚════██║██║   ██║██║  ██║██║   ██║
   ██║   ╚██████╔╝╚██████╔╝╚██████╗██║  ██║    ███████║╚██████╔╝██████╔╝╚██████╔╝
   ╚═╝    ╚═════╝  ╚═════╝  ╚═════╝╚═╝  ╚═╝    ╚══════╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═════╝  ╚═════╝

Credits to the Mole project (incredible tool btw) for the core functionality. See source here: https://github.com/tw93/Mole/blob/main/bin/touchid.sh

Enjoy!