I am looking for a way to escalate privileges within a python GUI app I'm developing. My desired model is GUFW. I like how you don't have to run the main program as root, but when you do anything "rooty," you have to "unlock" it.
I have a program where I am developing text files that need to be saved either in a user's home directory tree or in a directory in /usr (which need the root elevation).
I don't want to run the program as root, but call for root access when/if I need to save the file to a user different from the user running the program (in this case, root).
I don't want to save it to a temporary locations and revert to a (ba)sh call like:
os.system('gksu cp /tmp/myfile /usr/systemdir/myfile')
I would like to do it all programmatically within Python, if possible. In the future, I might need operations that are not simply creating a file but may need some appending in the middle of the file.
Also, after that save operation is done, I want the privies de-escalated.
Could someone point me to a tutorial or some example code for this endevour?
Regards,
Narnie
What you want is PolicyKit - the FreeDesktop spec and software for doing exactly this. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1359397 is a tutorial and sample code for using this with Python (although not having used PolicyKit personally, I can't speak to how good it is or isn't). Note that for new dbus and glib, you will want to use the GObject introspection (
from gi.repository import DBus) instead of the oldpython-dbusbindings, and this will almost certainly have flow-on changes compared to the sample code.