MacPython/Authorization

This wiki is in the process of being archived due to lack of usage and the resources necessary to serve it — predominately to bots, crawlers, and LLM companies. Edits are discouraged.
Pages are preserved as they were at the time of archival. For current information, please visit python.org.
If a change to this archive is absolutely needed, requests can be made via the infrastructure@python.org mailing list.

Authorization is a Python wrapper for Apple's Authorization API. Basically, it allows you to spawn arbitrary processes as root after successfully authenticating as an administrator. This is useful for installers, twiddling kernel settings (via sysctl or the like), etc.

status

Authorization is currently at its first public release, 0.1.

examples

   1 import os, sys, struct, tempfile
   2 from Authorization import Authorization, kAuthorizationFlagDestroyRights
   3 
   4 AUTHORIZEDTOOL = "#!%s\n%s" % (sys.executable,
   5 r"""
   6 import os
   7 print os.getuid(), os.geteuid()
   8 os.setuid(0)
   9 print "I'm root!"
  10 """)
  11 
  12 def main():
  13     auth = Authorization(destroyflags=(kAuthorizationFlagDestroyRights,))
  14     fd, name = tempfile.mkstemp('.py')
  15     os.write(fd, AUTHORIZEDTOOL)
  16     os.close(fd)
  17     os.chmod(name, 0700)
  18     try:
  19         pipe = auth.executeWithPrivileges(name)
  20         sys.stdout.write(pipe.read())
  21         pipe.close()
  22     finally:
  23         os.unlink(name)
  24 
  25 if __name__=='__main__':
  26     main()

Leopard

This will not compile directly on Leopard. You will need to change line 14 of Authorization.pxi from "raise" to "raise _err".

The following shows a concrete example for using this with Leopard.

# This has been tested on a Mac OS X 10.5.5 Leopard stock Python installation
# on October 25, 2008

# The following is sufficient for using Pyrex, 
# it doesn't need to be installed
export PATH=$HOME/Downloads/Pyrex-0.9.8.5:$PATH
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/Downloads/Pyrex-0.9.8.5:$PYTHONPATH

cd $HOME/Downloads/Authorization-0.1

# Solve "Use __cinit__ instead"
perl -pi -e  's/__new__/__cinit__/g' ./src/Authorization.pxi

# Solve "Reraise not inside except clause"
perl -pi -e 's/raise /#raise /g' ./src/Authorization.pxi

# Compile, but do not install
python ./setup.py build_ext --inplace

# Solve "cannot import name kAuthorizationFlagDestroyRights"
perl -pi -e  's/, kAuthorizationFlagDestroyRights//g' ./test/test.py
perl -pi -e  's/destroyflags=\(kAuthorizationFlagDestroyRights,\)//g' ./test/test.py

# Test
export PYTHONPATH=./lib/:$PYTHONPATH
python test/test.py

# should give:
# I'm root!

status

examples

Leopard

homepage