Linux: how to give a user permission to restart apache?

Solution 1:

Short answer:

Using visudo, add the following to your sudoers file, replacing username with the proper username:

username ALL = /etc/init.d/apache2 

If you want to not have to type in a password before you do this, use the following:

username ALL = NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/apache2 

After this, the 'username' user can execute sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start (or stop, restart,etc)

Long answer: You'll likely want to setup a separate user for this if you haven't already, and then configure the /etc/sudoers file to allow a user or group to execute the command you want.

For example, to allow the user 'ben' to execute all commands as root prompting for a password, you would do the following:

ben ALL= ALL

To allow 'ben' to execute only one command (like say, rm), you would do the following:

ben ALL= /bin/rm 

If you are running a script as a user and don't want to prompt for a password, you'll want to use the 'NOPASSWD' option like so:

ben ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/commandname options

You can do the same thing for groups by prefixing group names with a percentage sign, like so:

%supportstaff          ALL= NOPASSWD: /bin/commandname 

Solution 2:

Short answer: sudo.

The call would look similar to the following: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Easiest is to use visudo to set up the /etc/sudoers file. See man sudoers and man visudo for details.