Question

I’m a newbie with capistrano, and have been banging my head against this problem for a couple of days so would really appreciate some help.

We have an annoying security setup, which means that i cannot run capistrano tasks on the remote server as the ssh user. It’s a simpler version of This problem – which doesn’t seem to have a working answer.

Edit:
Delving further into this, I find that i can do something like:

run "su - newuser" do |channel, stream, data|

          channel.send_data("#{password}\n")

          channel.send_data("rm -rf #{release_path}\n")

        end }

I can use this to overwrite the default deploy methods, and do most of what I need to do. I can create the required directories on the server and so on, and pull from git as the ssh user using ssh forwarding. Which creates my next problem. I now have directories owned by newuser which contain files and directories owned by ssh_user. I do have sudo privileges as newuser, but can’t work out how to chmod the files. I’ve tried stuff like:

run "su - newuser" do |channel, stream, data

              channel.send_data("#{password}\n")

              channel.send_data("sudo chmod 775 #{cache_path}\n")

            end }

but everything just hangs, and it seems as if the block is executed in an infinite loop. Obviously there is a lot i don’t understand here and some pointers would be much appreciated – even if just to a good relevant read.

Answer 1

https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/wiki/2.x-DSL-Action-Invocation-Run
shows you the :shell option for run which you can set to:

run "your cmd", :shell => "su - other_user -s bash"

if you use predefined tasks, you better redefine run and su to merge the shell option.
this assumes your ssh user can su without password. if not use a block to send the password:

run "your cmd", :shell => "su - other_user -s bash" do |channel, stream, data|
  channel.send_data("#{other_user_password}\n")
end