How to Run Command Without Sudo

How to Run Sudo Commands from Script without using Sudo

Let's say we have the following case:

On a remote serwer I have a command that requires admin privliges e.g. systemctl command. I also have a script restartservicess.sh that uses that command to restart some services. Now I want to execute this script using some user without elevated privliges during continuos integration process.

In order to do that, we need to exclude specific commands from the requirement of using elevated privliges. In order to do that we will add them to a file that is going to be added to sudoers file. This file is located at:

/etc/sudoers

and at the end of this file we have default settings:

...
# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "@include" directives:

@includedir /etc/sudoers.d

Which mean that all files from sudoers.d will be added as extended permissions settings. Let´s create one file then. We need to use visudo in order to do it:

sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/extended_permissions_for_restarting_services

In this file we will write:

yourusername ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl restart gunicorn

Remember that the additional arguments to a command should be specified as a separate commands in order to include the exception e.g.:

yourusername ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl stop gunicorn
yourusername ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl start gunicorn

Now save the file and let´s go to our script restartservices.sh

What we had in the script:

sudo systemctl restart gunicorn

can now be changed to how our exception looks like:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Script run during ci
sudo /bin/systemctl restart gunicorn

Now when you log to your system using yourusername, you will be able to run:

bash restartservices.sh

Now the commands inside execute without entering password in the terminal. This is a complete solution to use nopasswd when you're stuck and it's not working.

This works every time on Ubuntu and any other debian based system.