mjhjmtu

I want that a regular user to be able to execute apachectl in the system. And that would be the only thing that they can do outside of it normal permissions. What I did is to add this line at the bottom of the sudoers file:

sampleuser ALL=(root) NOEXEC:/usr/sbin/apachectl

So, as the user sampleuser, I executed apachectl command, and I get this error:

$ sudo apachectl stop 
[sudo] password for sampleuser: 
/usr/sbin/apachectl: line 105: /usr/sbin/httpd: Permission denied

Now it seems like the permission is with the /usr/sbin/httpd command since apachectl script calls that executable file. So I added another line to the sudoers file:

sampleuser ALL=(root) NOEXEC:/usr/sbin/httpd

Now I executed the same command and I get the same error:

sudo apachectl start
[sudo] password for sampleuser: 
/usr/sbin/apachectl: line 105: /usr/sbin/httpd: Permission denied

My question now, is that if there's a fix for this without having to edit the apachectl script file or another method that probably is easier than what I'm trying to do.

Thank you.

Apachectl does not know that it needs to use sudo to execute httpd

Try something like this:

APACHE_HTTPD='sudo -E /usr/sbin/httpd' sudo -E /usr/sbin/apachectl start

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

So you will force apache2ctl to use a different command to call httpd...