Run Github Action as sudo

Question

I am using a fastlane Github action. I need to run it as the root user.

      - name: Deploy
        uses: maierj/[email protected]
        with:
          lane: 'alpha'
          subdirectory: 'android-staging'

How can I run this as sudo?

Answer 1

As @itsjack mentioned, You either have to use SUDO_ASKPASS with a script that writes your sudoer user's password to the stream or use the actual echo command with sudo -S to make sudo read it from the pipeline.
I think it's much safer to store the password as a GitHub secret and echo it to the pipeline before using sudo -S; like this:

jobs:
  Backup:
  runs-on: self-hosted
  steps:
    - name: Backup
      working-directory: ${{ secrets.PRODUCTIONWEBROOT }}
      run: echo ${{ secrets.USERPWD }} | sudo -S tar czf ./tmp/${{ format('Backup_Before_{0}.tar.gz', github.run_id) }} ./wwwroot

You can even use sudo as a user like www-data if you want:

jobs:
  Backup:
  runs-on: self-hosted
  steps:
    - name: Backup
      working-directory: ${{ secrets.PRODUCTIONWEBROOT }}
      run: echo ${{ secrets.USERPWD }} | sudo -S -u www-data tar czf ./tmp/${{ format('Backup_Before_{0}.tar.gz', github.run_id) }} ./wwwroot

REMEMBER: the USERPWD secret must be the password to the user who runs Github's self-hosted service. I mean the user you used to install the runner or the specific user you used to install the runner service using .svc.sh install USERNAME