Visudo rule not working for service restart

Question

I want to be able to restart a service in Ubuntu without being root.

$ whoami

ubuntu

Then I did:

sudo visudo

and I added a line:

ubuntu ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service javaspringapi restart

And saved the file. Resulting sudoers file:

sudo cat /etc/sudoers

#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults        env_reset
Defaults        mail_badpass
Defaults        secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin"

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

ubuntu ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service javaspringapi restart

Now when I try to run the command:

/usr/sbin/service javaspringapi restart

I still get:

 ==== AUTHENTICATING FOR org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units === 
 Authentication is required to restart 'javaspringapi.service'.
 Authenticating as: Ubuntu (ubuntu) 
 Password:

Answer 1

The sudoers file is referenced only if you run sudo (hence the name).

So you should be able to restart the service with

sudo /usr/sbin/service javaspringapi restart

without being prompted for password as this is what you have configured.