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Sparky1
Asked: 2011-11-08 13:15:01 +0800 CST

Call a shell script from PHP, run as root

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I'm running ubuntu 11.10. I want to be able to call a shell script from php and run that script as root. When my php attempts to call the shell script as root --like this: 

$output = shell_exec('sudo /var/www/my_script.sh')

I get this error in the apache log:

sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified

I've changed the owner of the php script to root:root. I've added this line to sudoers: 

www-data ALL = NOPASSWD:/var/www/my_script.php

I realize that I'm supposed to comment out this line in sudoers:

Defaults    requiretty

However, there's no such line in my sudoers file. What do I need to do to get past this error?

command-line

3 Answers

  1. Your sudoers line is granting access to execute "my_script.php" while your shell_exec is invoking "my_script.sh". When a password is not required, the requiretty option should be irrelevant.

    • 3

  2. Use "suexec"... in Ubuntu 10.04 server:

    sudo apt-get install apache2-suexec-common

    Enable suexec:

    sudo a2enmod suexec

    Edit the config file to match your site:

    sudo -e /etc/apache2/suexec/www-data

    Then see Using suEXEC on Apache.org to configure the Apache config file(s).

    Another approach...

    Allow the www-data user to run to run program1 and program2 with no password:

    sudo visudo

    Add to the contents of the sudoers file:

    User_Alias WWW_USER = www-data
Cmnd_Alias WWW_COMMANDS = /sbin/program1, /sbin/program2
WWW_USER ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD: WWW_COMMANDS

    Save.

    Yet another is with suPHP

    • 2

  3. I recently published a project that allows PHP to obtain and interact with a real Bash shell (as user: apache/www-data or root if needed). Get it here: https://github.com/merlinthemagic/MTS

    After downloading you would simply use the following code:

    //Setting the second argument in getShell():
//true will return a shell with root
//false will return a shell with the php execution user
$shell    = \MTS\Factories::getDevices()->getLocalHost()->getShell('bash', true);
$return1  = $shell->exeCmd('/var/www/my_script.sh');
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