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Znarkus
Asked: 2009-11-26 07:05:00 +0800 CST

Sudo svn to update as other user

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I want our developers (including moi) to be able to run svn update as user www-data on our server, for file/directory permissions.

My solution was to grant access to run sudo -u www-data svn with NOPASSWD in visudo. I also added an alias for this command, and named it svn to make it transparent for our developers.

This works, but I am asked for svn credentials every time (it doesn't save, even if I tell it to). I am thinking about adding the -i parameter, though I thought I should check with you guys first :)

How do I make this as smooth as running the svn update command normally?

Clarification: It is working now. I just don't want to enter my svn credentials every time I run svn update :)

linux

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am not entirely sure, but passing -H as an argument to sudo might take care of the credentials issue (being asked each time).

    This will set the HOME environment variable to /root by default, so I would guess that then the svn client my then know to look in /root/.subversion for the auth information. Specify a different home directory for wherever the credentials should be for your specific case. Also, make sure whatever use can write/read to that file.

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  2. Isn't this what setuid was made for? Create a script or compiled binary (depending on your security requirements) that does the update (one system call should do it), and have it setuid and owned by www-data.

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  3. Why not try running it with svn update --username wwwdata

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  4. This behaviour is implemented differently between different distros - which are you using?

    For RHEL5:

        Cmnd_Alias      SVN = /usr/bin/svn
    herbert         ALL = NOPASSWD: SVN

    Alternatively you can achieve the same thing with a single script (to restrict the user to a subset of the target program's functionality)

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