在bash脚本中激活python虚拟环境失败，并显示“ sudo：source：command not found”

Question

I'm trying to automate the deployment of my Python-Flask app on Ubuntu 18.04 using Bash by going through the motion of preparing all the necessary files/directories and cloning the source code from Github followed by creating the virtual environment, installing the pre-requisite modules and etc.

Now because I have to execute my Bash script using sudo , this means that the entire script will be executed as root except where I specify otherwise using sudo -u myuser and when it comes to activating my virtual environment, I get the following output: sudo: source: command not found and my subsequent pip installs are all installed outside of the virtual environment. Excerpts of my code below:

#!/bin/bash
...
sudo -u "$user" python3 -m venv .env
sudo -u $SUDO_USER source /srv/www/www.mydomain.com/.env/bin/activate
sudo -u "$user" pip install wheel
sudo -u "$user" pip install uwsgi
sudo -u "$user" pip install -r requirements.txt
...

Now for the life of me, I can't figure out how to activate the virtual environment in the context of the virtual environment if this makes any sense.

I've scoured the web and most of the questions/answers I found revolves around how to activate the virtual environment in a Bash script but not how to activate the virtual environment as a separate user within a Bash script that was executed as sudo .

Answer 1

That's because source is not an executable file, but a built-in bash command. It won't work with sudo , since the latter accepts a program name (ie executable file) as argument.

PS It's not clear why you have to execute the whole script as root. If you need to execute only a number of commands as root (eg for starting/stopping a service) and run a remaining majority as a regular user, you can use sudo only for these commands . Eg the following script

#!/bin/bash

# The `whoami` command outputs the current username. Unlike `source`, this is
# a full-fledged executable file, not a built-in command
whoami
sudo whoami
sudo -u postgres whoami

on my machine outputs

trolley813
root
postgres

PPS You probably don't need to activate an environment as root .