Sudo Rails Plugin

The sudo module makes it easier to deal with with system files for your rails project.

Problem:

• The Rails application should not run as root, and sometimes files needs to be installed as root
• Everything in rails should be testable, including installing files

Installation:

./script/plugin install [email protected]:allard/sudo.git

In production, sudo has to be configured to allow your web application user to run. If the owner is www, you can add this to /etc/sudoers:

www  ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: SETENV: ALL

Example:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base

  def after_save
    # The following function will write to:
    #   in production:  /var/tmp/outfile
    #   in development: Rails.root/tmp/filesystem/development/var/tmp/outfile
    #   in test:        Rails.root/tmp/filesystem/test/var/tmp/outfile
    #
    # In Production, the file will be owned as root
    # In Development and Test, the file ownership won't change
    # The file mode will change in all environments
    #
    Sudo.write(data, "/var/tmp/outfile", :user => "root", :mode => 600)
  end

end

class PostTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase

  def setup
    # This will reset Rails.root/tmp/filesystem/test with
    # any files from Rails.root/test/fixtures/filesystem
    Sudo.initialize_test
  end

  def test_check_outfile
    # Sudo.read will read from
    #   in production:  /var/tmp/outfile
    #   in development: Rails.root/tmp/filesystem/development/var/tmp/outfile
    #   in test:        Rails.root/tmp/filesystem/test/var/tmp/outfile
    #
    Post.create!(:data => "some_data")
    assert_equal "some_data", Sudo.read("/var/tmp/outfile")
  end

end

Compatibility:

Should work on all unix-like operating systems, including Mac OS X.

If rsync is installed, it will be used to reset the test environment between each test case. This is much faster than the fallback of rm, cp the fixtures to the test environment.

TODO:

• There's plenty of more functions that could be implemented like ln, cp, rm, ...