Recipe 5.13 Starting/Stopping Daemons via sudo

5.13.1 Problem

You want specific non-superusers to start and stop system daemons.

5.13.2 Solution

Here we let four different users start, stop, and restart web servers. The script for doing so is /etc/init.d/httpd for Red Hat, or /etc/init.d/apache for SuSE. We'll reference the Red Hat script in our solution.

/etc/sudoers:
User_Alias  FOLKS=barbara, l33t, jimmy, miroslav
Cmnd_Alias  DAEMONS=/etc/init.d/httpd start,\
        /etc/init.d/httpd stop,\
        /etc/init.d/httpd restart
FOLKS  ALL = (ALL) DAEMONS

5.13.3 Discussion

Note our use of sudo aliases for the users and commands. Read the sudoers(5) manpage to learn all kinds of fun capabilities like this.

5.13.4 See Also

sudo(8), sudoers(5).