Change to sudo user within a python script

Don’t try and make yourself sudo just check if you are and error if your not

class NotSudo(Exception):
    pass

if os.getuid() != 0:
    raise NotSudo("This program is not run as sudo or elevated this it will not work")

You can use setuid to set the users uid. But for obvious security reasons you can only do this if you are root (or the program has suid root rights). Both of these are probably a bad idea.

In this case you need to sudo rights to run a specific program. In that case just sub to “sudo theprogram” instead.

It is better to run as little of the program as possible with elevated privileges. You can run the small part that needs more privilege via the subprocess.call() function, e.g.

import subprocess
returncode = subprocess.call(["/usr/bin/sudo", "/usr/bin/id"])

I’ve recently dealt with this problem while making a system installation script. To switch to superuser permissions, I used subprocess.call() with ‘sudo’:

#!/usr/bin/python

import subprocess
import shlex
import getpass

print "This script was called by: " + getpass.getuser()

print "Now do something as 'root'..."
subprocess.call(shlex.split('sudo id -nu'))

print "Now switch back to the calling user: " + getpass.getuser()

Note that you need to use shlex.split() to make your command usable for subprocess.call(). If you want to use the output from a command, you can use subprocess.check_output(). There is also a package called ‘sh’ (http://amoffat.github.com/sh/) that you can use for this purpose.

If you are able to encapsulate just the necessary functionality requiring elevated privileges in a separate executable, you could use the setuid bit on the executable program, and call it from your user-level python script.

In this way, only the activity in the setuid-executable run as root, however executing this does NOT require sudo, i.e., root privileges. Only creating/modifying the setuid-executable requires sudo.

There are a few security implications, such as ensuring that your setuid executable program properly sanitizes any user input (e.g., parameters), so that it cannot be tricked into doing something it should not (confused deputy problem).

ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid#setuid_on_executables

edit: setuid only seems to work for compiled executables (binaries), and not interpreted scripts, so you may need to use a compiled setuid wrapper.

Are you talking about having the user input password half way through your execution? raw_input() can take a user input from console, but it will not mask the password.

>>>> y = raw_input()
somehting
>>> y
'somehting'

import subprocess
subprocess.check_output("sudo -i -u " + str(username) + " ls -l", shell=True).decode("utf-8").strip()

Not sure how this would help you, and it does not answer the question, yet, it is a workaround to think about when you run into a needed "root" user problem and you need to be "root" only to read / write in a folder or file.

You can then change the permissions and also switch them back afterwards. I had this in a docker-compose file that started a Python script that deployed an application to a server. This workaround was the only way how I got it to run. I do not even need to change the permissions from the container bash, instead, the script does that, and only the password is needed twice.

Before this workaround, I tried to change to the root user and then execute large blocks of code with that root user, to no avail.

run("ls -ld /usr/local/my_project/")
run("sudo chmod o+wx /usr/local/my_project/")
run("ls -ld /usr/local/my_project/")
my_code_that_needed_root_rights_and_now_runs_without_root_user()
run("sudo chmod 774 /usr/local/my_project/")
run("ls -ld /usr/local/my_project/")

And the output:

[server_connection] run: ls -ld /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] Login password for 'my_user': 
[server_connection] out: drwxrwxr-- 45 root 100005 4096 Apr 25 13:52 /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: 

[server_connection] run: sudo chmod o+wx /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: [sudo] password for my_user: 
[server_connection] out: 

[server_connection] run: ls -ld /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: drwxrwxrwx 45 root 100005 4096 Apr 25 13:52 /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: 

[...]    

[server_connection] run: sudo chmod 774 /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: [sudo] password for my_user: 
[server_connection] out: 

[server_connection] run: ls -ld /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: drwxrwxr-- 46 root 100005 4096 Apr 25 14:02 /usr/local/my_project/
[server_connection] out: 

After this, the server folder had the same permissions as before, and the code did not need the root user to run through.