How to Automatically Request Administrator Permissions in Go on Windows?

Handling Elevation with Go on Windows: A Step-by-Step Guide

Problem Statement

Many applications require administrator privileges for certain operations. When users run such applications without elevation, they encounter access denied errors. The task at hand is to find a technique for automatically requesting administrative permissions without having users explicitly perform the "Run as administrator" action.

Solution

In this blog, we explore a technique used to determine if the current process is running with administrator privileges and, if not, relaunch the process with a UAC prompt. This elegant solution can be employed in command-line tools where most operations do not require elevated rights. Only functions like installation and uninstallation, which modify the registry or install files in protected directories, trigger the elevation request.

The provided Go code employs the following approach:

1. When the current process lacks administrator privileges, the program relaunches itself using the ShellExecute function with the runas verb.
2. The amAdmin function identifies if the process is running as an administrator by attempting to open the \.PHYSICALDRIVE0 device file. If the open operation succeeds, the program assumes it has elevated permissions.

Implementation

The code provided in the answer presents the implementation details. The runMeElevated function performs the relaunch with UAC elevation, while the amAdmin function verifies administrator status.

Further Reading

For a more in-depth explanation of the technique, refer to the following resource:

• https://gist.github.com/jerblack/d0eb182cc5a1c1d92d92a4c4fcc416c6

The above is the detailed content of How to Automatically Request Administrator Permissions in Go on Windows?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!