Ruby Sudo

Give Ruby objects superuser privileges.

Based on dRuby and sudo.

Tested with MRI Ruby 2.7, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.

Your user must be allowed, in /etc/sudoers, to run ruby and kill commands as root.

A password may be required from the console, depending on the NOPASSWD options in /etc/sudoers.

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.

Let's start with a trivial example:

require 'my_gem/my_class'
require 'sudo'

obj   = MyGem::MyClass.new

# Now, create a Sudo::Wrapper object:
sudo  = Sudo::Wrapper.new

# 'mygem/myclass' will be automatically required in the
# sudo DRb server

# Start the sudo-ed Ruby process:
sudo.start!
sudo[obj].my_instance_method
sudo[MyClass].my_class_method

# Call stop! when finished, otherwise, that will be done
# when the `sudo` object gets garbage-collected.
sudo.stop!

A convenient utility for working with sudo is to use the run method and pass it a block. Run will automatically start and stop the ruby sudo process around the block.

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

Both Sudo::Wrapper.run and Sudo::Wrapper.new accept configuration options:

• ruby_opts (default: '') - Options to pass to the sudo-spawned ruby process
• Any configuration option can be passed to override global settings (e.g., timeout, load_gems, socket_dir, etc.)

If you'd like to prevent the loading of gems currently loaded from the calling program, pass load_gems: false. This will give your sudo process an unmodified environment. The only things required via the sudo process are 'drb/drb', 'fileutils', and of course 'sudo'.

For simple operations, you can use the convenience method:

require 'sudo'

# Accepts the same options as Wrapper.run:
Sudo.as_root(load_gems: false) do |sudo|
  sudo[FileUtils].mkdir_p '/root/only/path'
  sudo[File].write '/etc/config', content
end

Configure global defaults:

Sudo.configure do |config|
  config.timeout = 30           # Default: 10 seconds
  config.socket_dir = '/var/run' # Default: '/tmp'
  config.sudo_askpass = '/usr/bin/ssh-askpass'  # For graphical password prompts
  config.load_gems = false      # Default: true - whether to load current gems in sudo process
end

Set sudo_askpass to use graphical password prompts via sudo -A:

Sudo.configure do |config|
  config.sudo_askpass = '/usr/bin/ssh-askpass'
  # Or use the auto-detected constant for convenience:
  # config.sudo_askpass = Sudo::ASK_PATH_CMD
end

# Or per-wrapper:
Sudo::Wrapper.run(sudo_askpass: '/usr/bin/ssh-askpass') do |sudo|
  sudo[FileUtils].mkdir_p '/secure/path'
end

Configure connection timeouts:

# Global configuration
Sudo.configure do |config|
  config.timeout = 15  # Wait up to 15 seconds for sudo process to start
end

# Or per-wrapper
Sudo::Wrapper.run(timeout: 5) do |sudo|
  sudo[SomeClass].time_sensitive_operation
end

Guido De Rosa (@gderosa).

See (LICENSE).

• Dale Stevens (@voltechs)
• Robert M. Koch (@threadmetal)
• Wolfgang Teuber (@wteuber)

• Thanks to Tony Arcieri and Brian Candler for suggestions on ruby-talk.
• Initially developed by Guido De Rosa while working at @vemarsas.

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/TwilightCoders/rubysu/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request