This question has been asked before, but I can't seem to get it work.
One of the solutions I tried is using here-document. I used the following code:
#!/bin/bash
su - mv2 <<EOSU
DELIVER_BRANCH="development"
echo ${DELIVER_BRANCH}
exit;
EOSU
I tried the above code, bit echo ${DELIVER_BRANCH} doesn't print anything.
You want:
#!/bin/bash
su - mv2 <<'EOSU'
DELIVER_BRANCH="development"
echo "$DELIVER_BRANCH"
exit;
EOSU
Note the single quotes around the first EOSU.
If you omit them, the heredoc undergoes $-interpolation before being passed, which means that "$DELIVER_BRANCH" gets replaced with the current (to the shell invoking su) content of $DELIVERY_BRANCH, which is empty:
DELIVERY_BRANCH=production
cat <<'EOSU'
DELIVER_BRANCH="development"
echo "$DELIVER_BRANCH"
exit;
EOSU
prints
DELIVER_BRANCH="development"
echo "$DELIVER_BRANCH"
exit;
whereas
DELIVERY_BRANCH=production
cat <<EOSU
DELIVER_BRANCH="development"
echo "$DELIVER_BRANCH"
exit;
EOSU
prints
DELIVER_BRANCH="development"
echo production
exit;
su - USER -c 'echo XXX'sudoes not work well when piping commands in. Maybe stdin is not used or used in some other way (could not find something in the man page). But as @Rabin said you can pass short shell scripts via the-coption:su -c 'DELIVER=foo; echo $DELIVER; command1; command2 ...'