How to Elevate Go Applications to Administrator Privileges on Windows?

Elevate to Administrator Privileges on Windows with Go

Problem: Running Windows applications often requires administrative privileges, prompting users to right-click and select "Run as administrator." How can we bypass this manual step in our Go applications?

Solution:

To automate privilege elevation, we present a technique that detects whether the current user has administrator access. If not, it restarts the application with a User Account Control (UAC) prompt, allowing users to grant admin permissions.

Here's an example implementation:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "golang.org/x/sys/windows"
    "os"
    "syscall"
    "strings"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    // Check if we are running as administrator
    if !amAdmin() {
        runMeElevated()
        return
    }

    fmt.Println("Admin rights granted, proceed with your application")
    // ... Your administrator-privileged code here ...

    // This will wait 10 seconds to allow the program to execute and then exit.
    time.Sleep(10 * time.Second)
}

Explanation:

• amAdmin(): Checks if the current process is running as an administrator by attempting to open a reserved device drive.
• runMeElevated(): If not an administrator, it launches the current executable with the "runas" verb, requesting UAC elevation.
• Verb and Parameters: "runas" is the verb to run the program as a different user. The other parameters specify the executable, arguments, and current working directory.

Additional Notes:

• This method avoids the need for a manifest file.
• It works for most command-line tools where admin rights may be needed for specific functions.
• For more details and alternative methods, refer to the following Gist: https://gist.github.com/jerblack/d0eb182cc5a1c1d92d92a4c4fcc416c6

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