Running brew-installed utilities with sudo

[gmile]

What's a reasonable way to use sudo together with utilities, installed via brew?

I've installed and successfully using command-line utilities via brew on Kubuntu 22.04.1 Sometimes, I need to edit files that require elevated permissions. For example, I need to run sudo nvim /etc/sudoers, and such.

Unfortunately, an attempt to do this renders an error:

$ sudo nvim /etc/sudoers
$ sudo: nvim: command not found
$

I've identified at least 3 different ways to work around this error:

1. modify what's known as secure_path variable. doing so results in modification of root's PATH variable, so sudo starts to "see" binaries installed by homebrew,

2. (haven't tried this) wipe out secure_path variable so that current user's PATH is used to locate binary,

3. provide a full path to binary every time I use it, e.g.:

   sudo /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/nvim /etc/sudoers
   

Is there a better, "officially" acknowledged or documented, more reasonable way of running commands installed using brew - using sudo?

P.S. I've looked through existing discussions using this filter and this filter. This reply was insightful. though haven't looked through issues or PRs for homebrew.

[SMillerDev]

None of this is brew related though, you'll be better off asking the sudo developers for recommendations.

[danielnachun]

Oddly I would expect sudo -E to work here, but it seems like it doesn't. However sudo env PATH=$PATH nvim does seem to work, so you might be able to just alias sudo as sudo env PATH=$PATH. There may be security implications to always passing your PATH through to sudo like this so use with care.

[gromgit]

Oddly I would expect sudo -E to work here, but it seems like it doesn't.

Yeah, that only works if the setenv flag is set in /etc/sudoers. That's why the sudo man page says:

-E, --preserve-env
Indicates to the security policy that the user wishes to preserve their existing environment variables. The security policy may return an error if the user does not have permission to preserve the environment.

sudo can say NO ENV FOR YOU! even if you ask nicely. 😀

[carlocab]

If all you need is nvim, it may suffice to add /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/opt/neovim/bin to your secure_path, so that you can do sudo nvim without allowing sudo to be executed with everything in /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin.