Is there a recommended way to reduce the privilege of processes started with start_server and/or plackup? I am hoping to run webservers on the usual ports (80 and 443) but this of course requires high privilege. Ideally, after binding to these low ports the privileges should drop by switching process ownership to an unprivileged user as most off-the-shelf webservers will do these days. However, I could not immediately spot any simple way to do this either with start_server or with plackup.

What is the best way to achieve this? Currently I am simply running this as root:

start_server --port=80 -- plackup --server=Twiggy /path/to/myapp.psgi

but of course that leaves the app running as root which I would rather avoid. I could just run them unprivileged on a high port and handle the port mapping in netfilter but that seems a little hackish for something intended for production. Any other suggestions welcome.


In reply to Privilege reduction with start_server / plackup by hippo

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