Question

I’m creating a web app (php) that handles the creation of Drupal sites on a live server.

The system is able to create new sites and give some maintenance on existing ones. And, as this is a web-hosting environment, each folder may belong to a different user.

In order to do that properly I need to let the apache user run some commands as some other user.

What I do to create new files (and interact with git/drush/etc) is something similar to:

$some_command = `echo "PASSWD" | sudo -u USER -S do_something 2>&1; echo $?;`;

I already have a set of commands on the sudoers file that the apache user can run as the git user.

My issue now is that I need to let apache run as ANY user that may have a hosting account on the server.

My idea was to create a apache ALL=(ALL) ALL entry on the sudoers file. I would still leave all those commands asking for the users password.

With that in mind, is this wise to go with this approach? And if not, maybe I could apply the “allow all” policy only to the users that have a hosting account. If so, how do I narrow the policy to only one group?

Thanks

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Edit: I though on using suPHP for this, as it allows apache to run each PHP script as its owner. But I would still need to run some other commands as another user (as creating files in someone else’s home folder/public_html), so it seems that it isn’t an option.

Answer 1

Based on our discussion in comments, I would advise installing something like suPHP so that each of your user’s scripts are owned by their actual user and not Apache.

I figure you are having this issue is (maybe) because you want to be able to perform the administrative functions of other user’s sites from a web interface. If you have a generic user like apache that other users can run scripts as, allowing that user automatic sudo permission is a bad idea since it could easily be exploited to gain unauthorized access.

To get around that, make sure you run your administrative functions as a special admin user that has permission to modify other people’s files. Also make sure to chown any files you create as the appropriate user so they can read/write them. And as long as no other users can access that admin account or run PHP scripts as them, you should be much safer.

If you’re running the admin functions from the console then it should be even easier, otherwise just set up a suPHP user to run your master functions from the web and use good credentials for the account.

Doing something like that will be more secure and should allow you to do everything you need without opening things up more than necessary.