Dedicated user account for weewx?

[Wayne]

Hello - I am a new weewx user with medium proficiency in linux. Running on a Raspberry Pi 4 installed from DEB package.

Is there any benefit to creating a superuser account specifically for weewx instead of running as "root"? It seems to me it would be a better practice for using rsync to transfer files to an http server on another machine. Or maybe it's not worth the effort. Comments??

[Greg Troxel]

Yes, it's basically always better to have a uid (and to a lesser extend
gid) for each daemon and to grant them access to as little as possible.

weewx doesn't need to be root, in general. It just needs rw access to
devices that access weather stations, at least in my case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege

[cric...@pobox.com]

Aside from communicating with your weather station, the only other non-root hang up was where

the PID file was being written.  That's an easy command line option to write it somewhere the user

does have permissions.  I don't let systemd manage the process, so I don't need the pid file any

particular place.
Chris

[Cameron D]

There are notes on various aspects to this in the weewk wiki