Fresh Squeezed : Limon Noir

Today I had to move some data from an EC2 instance to a new system and wanted to do this via rsync. If you’re familiar with EC2, you know that there is a SSH key that is associated with each instance and you need to use this key to SSH to your EC2 instance. Passing a SSH key to your rsync command isn’t difficult -
rsync -avz -e “ssh -i key.pem” ec2-user@ipaddress:/www/* /www

But where I was having issues was with some of the remote directories not being accessible to the ec2-user. I kept receiving the following error when I was trying to pass sudo via rsync -
rsync -avz -e “ssh -i key.pem” –rsync-path=”sudo rsync” ec2-user@ipaddress:/www/* /www
sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

The solution was to comment out ‘Defaults requiretty’ in the sudoers file. After commenting out that entry in the remote system’s sudoers file, I was able to rsync my directories without issue.