Update the torrc in GitHub Actions

[Lyro1]

Hello there,

I have a project in which I have to make requests via the tor service.
I have no issue at all to install and start the tor service in my Github Action, but I need to change the torrc file, which is the configuration file for tor.

I tried to do so:

- name: Setup Tor config
      run: |
        sudo echo "ControlPort 9051" >> /etc/tor/torrc
        sudo echo "CookieAuthentication 1" >> /etc/tor/torrc
        sudo echo "CacheDirectoryGroupReadable 1" >> /etc/tor/torrc

But I get the following error:

Run sudo echo "ControlPort 9051" >> /etc/tor/torrc
9
/home/runner/work/_temp/d4dce9d5-4ca2-43a2-aa49-8a369f544a77.sh: line 1: /etc/tor/torrc: Permission denied

Is there any way I can modify my torrc for my Github Action to run?

[airtower-luna]

This doesn’t work because of how shell redirection works: If you do

sudo echo "ControlPort 9051" >> /etc/tor/torrc

what happens is:

• The command sudo echo "ControlPort 9051" is executed
• The output of that command is redirected and appended to /etc/tor/torrc

That redirect is done by the shell that executes your command, it is not part of the sudo command, so it runs with regular user rights. Only echo runs as root. 😅

To make it work you need to make the process that writes to the file run as root. Two common solutions:

1. Wrap everything in a root shell. You can do that by creating a script file and running that with sudo, or by wrapping the command with bash -c:

sudo bash -c 'echo "ControlPort 9051" >> /etc/tor/torrc'

2. Send the echo output to a command that’s dedicated to writing to a file:

echo "ControlPort 9051" | sudo tee --append /etc/tor/torrc

[Simran-B]

Re 2: Does tee run as root or how is it able to append to the file?

[airtower-luna]

I meant for it to, thank you for the catch! I’ve fixed the example. 😅

[Lyro1]

Thanks, this worked as expected!

I faced another issue later on, but this will have its own new topic :slight_smile: