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https://github.com/tianon/gosu

Simple Go-based setuid+setgid+setgroups+exec
https://github.com/tianon/gosu

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Simple Go-based setuid+setgid+setgroups+exec

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README 

        
# gosu



This is a simple tool grown out of the simple fact that `su` and `sudo` have very strange and often annoying TTY and signal-forwarding behavior.  They're also somewhat complex to setup and use (especially in the case of `sudo`), which allows for a great deal of expressivity, but falls flat if all you need is "run this specific application as this specific user and get out of the pipeline".



The core of how `gosu` works is stolen directly from how Docker/libcontainer itself starts an application inside a container (and in fact, is using the `/etc/passwd` processing code directly from libcontainer's codebase).



```console

$ gosu

Usage: ./gosu user-spec command [args]

   eg: ./gosu tianon bash

       ./gosu nobody:root bash -c 'whoami && id'

       ./gosu 1000:1 id



./gosu version: 1.1 (go1.3.1 on linux/amd64; gc)

```



Once the user/group is processed, we switch to that user, then we `exec` the specified process and `gosu` itself is no longer resident or involved in the process lifecycle at all.  This avoids all the issues of signal passing and TTY, and punts them to the process invoking `gosu` and the process being invoked by `gosu`, where they belong.



## Warning



The core use case for `gosu` is to step _down_ from `root` to a non-privileged user during container startup (specifically in the `ENTRYPOINT`, usually).



Uses of `gosu` beyond that could very well suffer from vulnerabilities such as CVE-2016-2779 (from which the Docker use case naturally shields us); see [`tianon/gosu#37`](https://github.com/tianon/gosu/issues/37) for some discussion around this point.



## Installation



High-level steps:



1. download `gosu-$(dpkg --print-architecture | awk -F- '{ print $NF }')` as `gosu`

2. download `gosu-$(dpkg --print-architecture | awk -F- '{ print $NF }').asc` as `gosu.asc`

3. fetch my public key (to verify your download): `gpg --batch --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys B42F6819007F00F88E364FD4036A9C25BF357DD4`

4. `gpg --batch --verify gosu.asc gosu`

5. `chmod +x gosu`



For explicit `Dockerfile` instructions, see [`INSTALL.md`](INSTALL.md).



## Why?



```console

$ docker run -it --rm ubuntu:trusty su -c 'exec ps aux'

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

root         1  0.0  0.0  46636  2688 ?        Ss+  02:22   0:00 su -c exec ps a

root         6  0.0  0.0  15576  2220 ?        Rs   02:22   0:00 ps aux

$ docker run -it --rm ubuntu:trusty sudo ps aux

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

root         1  3.0  0.0  46020  3144 ?        Ss+  02:22   0:00 sudo ps aux

root         7  0.0  0.0  15576  2172 ?        R+   02:22   0:00 ps aux

$ docker run -it --rm -v $PWD/gosu-amd64:/usr/local/bin/gosu:ro ubuntu:trusty gosu root ps aux

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

root         1  0.0  0.0   7140   768 ?        Rs+  02:22   0:00 ps aux

```



Additionally, due to the fact that `gosu` is using Docker's own code for processing these `user:group`, it has exact 1:1 parity with Docker's own `--user` flag.



If you're curious about the edge cases that `gosu` handles, see [`Dockerfile.test-alpine`](Dockerfile.test-alpine) for the "test suite" (and the associated [`test.sh`](test.sh) script that wraps this up for testing arbitrary binaries).



(Note that `sudo` has different goals from this project, and it is *not* intended to be a `sudo` replacement; for example, see [this Stack Overflow answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/48105623) for a short explanation of why `sudo` does `fork`+`exec` instead of just `exec`.)



## Alternatives



### `chroot`



With the `--userspec` flag, `chroot` can provide similar benefits/behavior:



```console

$ docker run -it --rm ubuntu:trusty chroot --userspec=nobody / ps aux

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

nobody       1  5.0  0.0   7136   756 ?        Rs+  17:04   0:00 ps aux

```



### `setpriv`



Available in newer `util-linux` (`>= 2.32.1-0.2`, in Debian; https://manpages.debian.org/buster/util-linux/setpriv.1.en.html):



```console

$ docker run -it --rm buildpack-deps:buster-scm setpriv --reuid=nobody --regid=nogroup --init-groups ps faux

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

nobody       1  5.0  0.0   9592  1252 pts/0    RNs+ 23:21   0:00 ps faux

```



### `su-exec`



In the Alpine Linux ecosystem, [`su-exec`](https://github.com/ncopa/su-exec) is a minimal re-write of `gosu` in C, making for a much smaller binary, and is available in the `main` Alpine package repository.  However, as of version 0.2 it has [a pretty severe parser bug](https://github.com/ncopa/su-exec/pull/26) that hasn't been in a release for many years (and which the buggy behavior is that typos lead to running code as root unexpectedly 😬).



### Others



I'm not terribly familiar with them, but a few other alternatives I'm aware of include:



- `chpst` (part of `runit`)