Shell – Understanding proper sudo usage to use local user $GOPATH

shellsudovim

To understand my problem, here's my current setup:

I'm working with a user "foo", that user has a $GOPATH as /foo/go/.

This user is in the sudo'ers group.

I am trying to work in a git directory on a go project. If I use sudo I can edit the file, the problem is that if I try to build my project from vim, or run anything from my gopath (such as :GoMetaLinter) then it runs in the context of the root user, since I used sudo, but this user has no gopath set.

I don't really understand how to solve this properly. I've restored to opening the file as read only to use my linter and then using vim to sudo and write, but that's stupid, and I know it's not "correct". What is the proper way for using sudo so my local users context/variables are used and not roots?

Best Answer

sudo will not keep environment variables due to security concerns. To override this, adding something like

Defaults env_keep += "HOME GOPATH"

to /etc/sudoers should help, listing the environment variables you whish to preserve.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8633461/how-to-keep-environment-variables-when-using-sudo#8633575 may contain additional hints.

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Linux – Using vim to view the contents of a directory file

In the historical Unix system, directories were implemented as normal files with a special mode indicating that they were directories. This is no longer true on many modern filesystems and operating systems. When it comes to the on-disk structures, a directory may or may not be represented as a file-like blob of storage, depending on the filesystem. When it comes to the operating system interfaces, there are separate system calls to access directories and regular files: opendir, readdir, rewinddir, closedir corresponding to open, read, rewind, close respectively.

Software that reads a directory must use the directory-specific interfaces. When you open a directory in Vim, it doesn't load its contents, the way it would for a file. Vim doesn't have any native handling for directories: if you run vim --noplugin on a directory, Vim complains that "foo" is a directory and won't save the buffer for that same reason.

The primary goal of netrw is to access remote files (over a variety of network protocols). Since you can't easily go and run commands like ls and cp in the directories containing these remote files, netrw includes code to browse directories and manipulate them — it's a file manager as well as a remote file browser. These file manager capacities make sense locally as well as remotely, so netrw registers itself as a handler for local directories in addition to remote files and directories.

Sudo – impersonating a user

So as you said yourself @krzysto, the solution is to add the following to the sudoers file

beans ALL = (root,apache) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/ksh -c /opt/renovations/var/script-*.sh 
beans ALL = (root,apache) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/bash -c /opt/renovations/var/script-*.sh

The next piece that is missing is to make sure that the group has execute permissions on the scripts, so that you can execute them.

Best Answer

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Linux – Using vim to view the contents of a directory file

Sudo – impersonating a user

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