python - Running interactive commands in Paramiko

Question

I'm trying to run an interactive command through paramiko. The cmd execution tries to prompt for a password but I do not know how to supply the password through paramiko's exec_command and the execution hangs. Is there a way to send values to the terminal if a cmd execution expects input interactively?

ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.connect(server, username=username, password=password)
ssh_stdin, ssh_stdout, ssh_stderr = ssh.exec_command("psql -U factory -d factory -f /tmp/data.sql")

Does anyone know how this can addressed? Thank you.

Answer 1

The full paramiko distribution ships with a lot of good demos.

In the demos subdirectory, demo.py and interactive.py have full interactive TTY examples which would probably be overkill for your situation.

In your example above ssh_stdin acts like a standard Python file object, so ssh_stdin.write should work so long as the channel is still open.

I've never needed to write to stdin, but the docs suggest that a channel is closed as soon as a command exits, so using the standard stdin.write method to send a password up probably won't work. There are lower level paramiko commands on the channel itself that give you more control - see how the SSHClient.exec_command method is implemented for all the gory details.