Request UAC elevation in Go

Is there any way to elevate a new process or thread to administrator in Go?

It seems like ShellExecute() isn't available in Go and it isn't possible to elevate with CreateProcess(). I have no idea what else could be possible.

Solution

You can try and check the project w32: it has a shell32.go ShellExecute() that could be useful.

w32 is a wrapper of windows apis for the Go Programming Language.

It wraps win32 apis to "Go style" to make them easier to use.

Update 2020, since 2014, the package golang.org/x/sys/windows does have a ShellExecute() function.

Cliven mentions Jeremy Black's blog post "Relaunch Windows Golang program with UAC elevation when admin rights needed"

Jeremy first detects if the program is already running as admin by attempting to open \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 (per this reddit suggestion)
```
_, err := os.Open("\\\\.\\PHYSICALDRIVE0")
```

Then Jeremy uses the ShellExecute() function, to call runas (described in "Elevating During Runtime" from Michael Haephrati)

func runMeElevated() {
    verb := "runas"
    exe, _ := os.Executable()
    cwd, _ := os.Getwd()
    args := strings.Join(os.Args[1:], " ")

    verbPtr, _ := syscall.UTF16PtrFromString(verb)
    exePtr, _ := syscall.UTF16PtrFromString(exe)
    cwdPtr, _ := syscall.UTF16PtrFromString(cwd)
    argPtr, _ := syscall.UTF16PtrFromString(args)

    var showCmd int32 = 1 //SW_NORMAL

    err := windows.ShellExecute(0, verbPtr, exePtr, argPtr, cwdPtr, showCmd)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
    }
}