Restarting apache without being superuser

Question

Is there any possibility to perform graceful restart and check apache config syntax without being root or having root privileges?

I have already tried to set suid bit to the script which performs restart. Here is the script itself:

#!/bin/bash

FILENAME=$1
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
DIRECTORY='bckp/'
if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then
    echo "Backup directory doesn't exist. Creating one."
    mkdir $DIRECTORY
fi

if [ -z "$FILENAME" -a ! -f "$FILENAME" ]; then
    FILENAME="webdav.conf"
    echo "No file specified. Backing up webdav.conf"
fi

REV=0
BACKUP="$FILENAME.$DATE.$REV"

while [ -f $BACKUP ]; do
    let REV+=1
    BACKUP="$DIRECTORY$FILENAME.$DATE.$REV"
done

cp $FILENAME $BACKUP

echo $OUTPUT
OUTPUT=$(apache2ctl configtest 2>&1)
if [ "$OUTPUT" == "Syntax OK" ]; then
    echo "Syntax OK"
    echo "Performing restart"
    apachectl -k graceful 2>&1
fi

exit $?

here is the ls -l for this file:

-rwsrwxr-x 1 root user  645 2012-04-26 18:05 graceful-restart

When i try to run this script i get the following output:

No file specified. Backing up webdav.conf
ulimit: 88: error setting limit (Operation not permitted) Syntax OK

I'm interested if it is possible to perform what i've described.

Answer 1

Linux will not honor the suid bit on a shell script. Read this for more information.

A common solution for this is the sudo command. With an entry like this in /etc/sudoers:

yourname ALL = NOPASSWD:/path/to/graceful-restart

You could run:

sudo /path/to/graceful-restart

And this would run with root privileges without prompting you for a password. See the sudoers man page for more information on the syntax of the sudoers file.