Source Repo

Read-only access to the sudo source repository (from as far back as 1993) is available for checkout using git. If you are interested in contributing to sudo, the easiest way is probably via GitHub.

The main sudo source repo is located at git.sudo.ws. However, it is much faster to use one of the two official git mirrors, GitHub and Bitbucket.

The following examples will use GitHub.

To download a copy of the repo you must first install git. You can then make a clone of the repo by running:

git clone https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo.git

This will create a copy of the sudo repo on your local machine in the sudo directory. This step only needs to be done once.

By default, this will check out the HEAD of the main development branch. To check out a copy of the sudo 1.9 source files, change to the sudo directory that you just created and run:

cd sudo
git checkout sudo-1.9

This will populate the sudo directory with the sudo source files for the HEAD of the sudo 1.9 branch.

If you want to checkout a specific version of sudo, you can use the symbolic tag for that release. For example, to check out sudo version 1.9.0 you would do:

git checkout SUDO_1_9_0

Once you have the source tree checked out, you can update it thusly:

cd sudo
git pull

This will pull in changes from the master repo and merge them into your local repo. To fetch upstream changes without merging them or updating the local copy, use:

cd sudo
git fetch

You can also do standard operations like log, diff, and annotate. While you can check in changes to your local copy of the repo, you will be unable to push the changes directly upstream. Changes may be submitted in the form of GitHub pull requests.

If you are new to git, the Git Handbook is a good place to start.

You can also browse the sudo source tree with on the web by clicking on the tree tab at git.sudo.ws. This provides a nice interface and can be handy when you don’t necessarily want to check out a full copy of the source tree. Note that there are several branches and the default branch (main) may not be the one you want. Stable (released) versions of sudo are built from a branch that begins with sudo, followed by a major and minor number, e.g. sudo-1.9, sudo-1.8, sudo-1.7 and sudo-1.6. To view a specific release, use that release’s tag, e.g. hg up SUDO_1_9_0. You may also browse the sudo source tree on GitHub or Bitbucket.

Prior to sudo version 1.5.8, the source tree was stored in RCS without the use of symbolic tags. While there are symbolic tags for versions previous to 1.5.8, not all files included in those distributions have corresponding versions in the source tree.