Running "sudo su" within a gitlab pipeline - shell

Question

I've installed some software on a server that my gitlab runner SSH's to, and one of the commands needs to be run after doing sudo su. If I run it as a regular user, but with sudo in front of it - it doesn't work. I have to first completely switch to the sudo user first.
This works fine when I SSH into the server and do the commands manually. But when I try it from the pipeline (rough code below):
my_script:
stage: stage
script:
- ssh -o -i id_rsa -tt user#1.1.1.1 << EOF
- sudo su
- run_special_command <blah blah>
- exit
# above exits from the SSH. below should stop the pipeline
- exit 0
- EOF
I get very weird output like the below:
$ sudo su
[user#1.1.1.1 user]$ sudo su
echo $'\x1b[32;1m$ run_special_command <blah blah>\x1b[0;m'
run_special_command <blah blah>
echo $'\x1b[32;1m$ exit\x1b[0;m'
exit
echo $'\x1b[32;1m$ exit 0\x1b[0;m'
exit 0
echo $'\x1b[32;1m$ EOF\x1b[0;m'
And what I'm seeing is that it doesn't even run the command at all - and I can't figure out why.

Answer 1

In this case, you need to put your script as a multi-line string in your YAML. Alternatively, commit a shell script to repo and execute that.
and one of the commands needs to be run after doing sudo su. If I run it as a regular user, but with sudo in front of it - it doesn't work.
As a side note, you can probably use sudo -E instead of sudo su before the command. But what you have should also work with the multi-line script.
MyJob:
script: |
ssh -o -i id_rsa -tt user#host << EOF
sudo -E my_command
EOF
exit 0
Alternatively, write your script into a shell script committed to the repository (with executable permissions set) and run it from your job:
MyJob:
script: “my_script.sh”