Ruby Sudo
Give Ruby objects superuser privileges.
Only tested with MRI 1.9 .
REQUIREMENTS
Your user must be allowed, in /etc/sudoers
, to run ruby
and kill
commands as root.
A password will be required from the console, or not, depending on the NOPASSWD
options in /etc/sudoers
.
USAGE
Let’s start with a trivial example:
require 'mygem/myclass'
require 'sudo'
obj = MyGem::MyClass.new
Now, create a Sudo::Wrapper object:
sudo = Sudo::Wrapper.new
Start the sudo-ed Ruby process:
# 'mygem/myclass' will be automatically required in the
# sudo DRb server
sudo.start!
Use it!
sudo[obj].my_instance_method
sudo[MyClass].my_class_method
When you’ve done, stop! it. Otherwise, that will be done (only) when the sudo
object gets garbage-collected.
sudo.stop!
With a block
Use Sudo::Wrapper::run in this case.
require 'fileutils'
require 'sudo'
Sudo::Wrapper.run do |sudo|
sudo[FileUtils].mkdir_p '/ONLY/ROOT/CAN/DO/THAT'
end
# Sockets and processes are closed automatically when the block exits
PRINCIPLES OF OPERATION
Spawns a sudo-ed Ruby process running a DRb server. Communication is done via a Unix socket (and, of course, permissions are set to 0600
).
No long-running daemons involved, everything is created on demand.
Access control is entirely delegated to sudo
.
TODO
sudo
has a -A
option to accept password via an external program (maybe graphical): support this feature.
THANKS
Thanks to Tony Arcieri and Brian Candler for suggestions on ruby-talk.
AUTHOR
Sponsored by VEMAR s.a.s.
LICENSE:
(The MIT License)
Copyright © 2010 Guido De Rosa
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.