I have a Python app that I'm working on that needs to access the hosts file to append a few lines. Everything worked on my test file, but when I told the program to actually modify my hosts file in /etc/hosts I get IOError 13. From what I understand, my app doesn't have root privileges.
My question is, how can I circumnavigate this issue? Is there a way to prompt the user for their password? Would the process be any different if I was running the app on a Windows machine?
Here's the code in question:
f = open("/etc/hosts", "a")
f.write("Hello Hosts File!")
Also, I plan on using py2app and py2exe for the final product. Would they handle the root privilege issue for me?
The easiest way to handle this is to write out your changes to a temp file, then run a program to overwrite the protected file. Like so:
with open('/etc/hosts', 'rt') as f:
s = f.read() + '\n' + '127.0.0.1\t\t\thome_sweet_home\n'
with open('/tmp/etc_hosts.tmp', 'wt') as outf:
outf.write(s)
os.system('sudo mv /tmp/etc_hosts.tmp /etc/hosts')
When your Python program runs sudo, the sudo program will prompt the user for his/her password. If you want this to be GUI based you can run a GUI sudo, such as "gksu".
On Windows, the hosts file is buried a couple subdirectories under \Windows. You can use the same general trick, but Windows doesn't have the sudo command. Here is a discussion of equivalents:
https://superuser.com/questions/42537/is-there-any-sudo-command-for-windows