How to check if node.js script runs with admin privileges on linux?

Question

I am developing a node.js script which scans BLE advertisements using @abandonware/noble .

Platform:

• Operating System: Linux Mint 21.1
• Kernel: Linux 5.15.0-58-generic
• Architecture: x86-64
• node.js version 19.0.4

The script causes a segfault when not run with sudo and I found no way to prevent this. The noble documentation mentions that if you want bluetooth scanning as regular user you need to set privileges with:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw+eip $(eval readlink -f `which node`)

but that does not make a change.

So I want to check in the script if it runs with admin privileges. I tried with process.getuid() as written here but that always returns 1000 no matter if ran with sudo or not.

How can I check if the script runs with sudo ?

Answer 1

you can use the os.userInfo() .uid method to check the user id of the current user.

const os = require('os');
const user = os.userInfo().uid;
if (user === 0) {
  console.log('Running with root privileges');
} else {
  console.log('Not running with root privileges');
}

Keep in mind, that the scripts must be executed with sudo in order for it to run with root permissions.