How to change permissions or call a command without having to change permissions in an ONLINE Python environment? - python-3.x

Question

I tried to make it so that my bot will create a directory inside a directory in the bot to store server data.
I originally just wanted to create the directory without worrying about permissions:
#client.event
async def on_guild_join(guild):
print(f'Recognized that Beatboxer has joined {guild.name}')
guild_path = rf'/guilds/{guild.id}'
if not os.path.exists(guild_path):
os.makedirs(rf'/guilds/{guild.id}')
An error message came up that looked like this:
Ignoring exception in on_guild_join
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/virtualenvs/python3/lib/python3.8/site-packages/discord/client.py", line 312, in _run_event
await coro(*args, **kwargs)
File "main.py", line 227, in on_guild_join
os.makedirs(rf'guilds/{guild.id}')
File "/usr/lib/python3.8/os.py", line 223, in makedirs
mkdir(name, mode)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'guilds/727168023101964298'
I then tried adding os.chmod into the code, but, for some reason, still had the same error message.
os.chmod("guilds", 777)
#client.event
async def on_guild_join(guild):
print(f'Recognized that Beatboxer has joined {guild.name}')
guild_path = rf'/guilds/{guild.id}'
if not os.path.exists(guild_path):
os.makedirs(rf'/guilds/{guild.id}')
Also, calling os.chdir and changing the directory into there did not work, and had a similar error message.
os.chmod("guilds", 777)
#client.event
async def on_guild_join(guild):
print(f'Recognized that Beatboxer has joined {guild.name}')
guild_path = rf'/guilds/{guild.id}'
if not os.path.exists(guild_path):
os.chdir('/guilds')
os.makedirs(rf'{guild.id}')
Finally, I attempted one last thing (which obviously still didn't work), which was os.popen, which opens a pipe for a command, allowing it to transfer the output to a file which is editable by other programs (which therefore should not regard what any permissions do):
#client.event
async def on_guild_join(guild):
print(f'Recognized that Beatboxer has joined {guild.name}')
guild_path = rf'/guilds/{guild.id}'
if not os.path.exists(guild_path):
os.popen(os.makedirs(rf'/guilds/{guild.id}'))
All of these attempted codes have very similar error messages, particularly Errno 13. Computer configuration will most likely not work. Please help? Thank you!

Answer 1

The problem is not that the functions you use are wrong.
You are actually giving a directory location you dont have permission to.
There are 2 kinds of paths to folders. Absolute paths and relative paths. In the examples you gave you used absolute path. When you use the absolute path you use the root directory as starting point. The thing with online IDE's is that you often dont have direct access to the root directory. Thus making new directories will give permission errors.
So how do we fix this? I suggest using relative paths instead. To fix this in your code is really easy, instead of doing this:
'/path/to/folder'
Do this:
'./path/to/folder'
By using ./ instead of /. You use the current folder as your starting point instead of the root directory. As you often have access to the current folder this wont give permission errors.