Execute script from rc.local as user instead of root

Question

I want to execute a script every time my server start up. The problem is that I need to be a certain user to execute the script, if I try to do it as root it cant find certain packages (such as ruby).

I try to change to xxx user01.

sudo su user01
/etc/init.d/script start

This doesn't work however.

Solution 1

Running sudo su user01 in a script does not mean the following commands are sent to the resultant shell. In fact, it likely means a new shell is spawned as user01, which never exits!

Two things:

• You can execute a command as another user either by passing the -c 'command...' argument to su, like su user01 -c '/etc/init.d/script start'.
• Starting a service that uses /etc/init.d from rc.local isn't the correct thing to do. You want to use enable the service at startup using your distribution tools, like chkconfig or update-rc.d. You also don't want jobs in /etc/init.d that shouldn't be started as root. The jobs themselves can feel free to fork to another user account, but should be invoked by root.

Solution 2

You could put something in /etc/crontab and run it @reboot

@reboot username /etc/init.d/script start

Solution 3

You can just run the command through sudo like this:

sudo -H -u user01 /etc/init.d/script start

-H sets the HOME environment variable to that of the user

-u specifies the username to run as

Comments

[Greg Petersen]

Post your init script?

[Dom]

Do you have some logs ?

[Mat]

Why don't you simply use su in the rc script?

[Ferdinand Prantl]

See stackoverflow.com/questions/8940771/….

[Jake]

or in the user's own crontab file.