Ruby Sudo¶ ↑

Give Ruby objects superuser privileges.

Based on dRuby and sudo.

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.

CREDITS ¶ ↑

AUTHOR¶ ↑

Guido De Rosa.

CONTRIBUTORS¶ ↑

Robert M. Koch.

THANKS¶ ↑

Thanks to Tony Arcieri and Brian Candler for suggestions on ruby-talk.

COPYRIGHT¶ ↑

(The MIT License)

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.

daniel-barrows/rubysu