Sudoer statement syntax to source virtualenv activate file

Question

I'm on a 64-bit Centos 5 Linux. This comes with Python2.4, but I needed 2.6 or higher to get psycopg2. I installed a virtual environment to run Python2.7.3 (based on this http://toomuchdata.com/2012/06/25/how-to-install-python-2-7-3-on-centos-6-2/) Now things seem to be working well when I'm logged in as root.

But I need to be able to use the virtualenv as a non-root user, joshmoe. (And start/stop postgresql as this other user)

The command for getting into the virtualenv is:

source /root/Python-2.7.3/projectdir/bin/activate

Understandably, when I run this command as joshmoe, I get a permission denied message:

-bash: /root/Python-2.7.3/projectdir/bin/activate: Permission denied

In an attempt to make this command available to joshmoe, I edited /etc/sudoers to include the following line:

joshmoe ALL=NOPASSWD: /root/Python-2.7.3/projectdir/bin/activate

Now from the joshmoe login, when I run:

sudo source /root/Python-2.7.3/projectdir/bin/activate

I get the following:

sudo: source: command not found

It seems pretty clear to me that I'm not using the sudoers file correctly to specify sourcing this file -- I seem to be giving access to that 'activate' file successfully, but not to the built-in source function. Either of following lines give syntax errors in sudoers:

joshmoe ALL=NOPASSWD: source 

joshmoe ALL=NOPASSWD: source /root/Python-2.7.3/projectdir/bin/activate

I've found a good many examples of shudders statements. But I can't figure out the syntax that will make this work. I'm hoping once I get this one, I'll be able to give access to statements like 'service postgresql status' and so forth.

Answer 1

Your problem is that you user doesn't have root access to your virutalenv directory. You need to grant the user access for it to work, for example using:

sudo chmod o+x /root                     # grant access to root directory
sudo chmod o+rX /root/Python-2.7.3 -R    # recursively grant access to everything in Python-2.7.3

source isn't a program, it's a shell butiltin which causes a script to be sourced in the current shell. sudo can only execute programs, not shell builtins, functions or aliases, that's why you get that error.

Answer 2

You can't run source as as sudo source; it's a built-in command for bash, not a program. What you want to do here is probably start a new shell as superuser using sudo -s.