using sudo inside jupyter notebook's cell

Update: I checked all the methods, all of them are working.


1:

Request password using getpass module which essentially hides input by user and then run sudo command in python.

 import getpass
 import os

 password = getpass.getpass()
 command = "sudo -S apt-get update" #can be any command but don't forget -S as it enables input from stdin
 os.system('echo %s | %s' % (password, command))

2:

 import getpass
 import os

 password = getpass.getpass()
 command = "sudo -S apt-get update" # can be any command but don't forget -S as it enables input from stdin
 os.popen(command, 'w').write(password+'\n') # newline char is important otherwise prompt will wait for you to manually perform newline

NOTE for above methods:

The field where you enter the password may not appear in the ipython notebook. It appears in the terminal window on a mac, and I imagine it will appear in a command shell on a PC. Even the result details would appear in the terminal.

3:

You can store your password in mypasswordfile file and just type in cell :

!sudo -S apt-get install blah < /pathto/mypasswordfile # again -S is important here

I would prefer this method if I want to view output of the command in jupyter notebook itself.

References:

  1. Requesting password in IPython notebook

  2. https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/getpass.html

  3. Using sudo with Python script

You can pass python variables from a notebook to the shell without importing the os or subprocess modules by using the {varname} syntax (e.g. this cool blog).

If you have defined a password and command variable in python (see Suparshva's answer) then you can run this one-liner:

!echo {password}|sudo -S {command}

The exclamation mark tells jupyter to run it in the shell, the echo command will then get the real password (e.g. 'funkymonkey') from the variable called password and then pipe it into the sudo'd command variable (which is a string that describes a shell command, e.g. 'apt-get update').


You can

subprocess.Pope(['sudo', 'apt-get', 'install', 'bla'])

If you want to avoid the python syntax, you can define your own cell magic that does that for you (e.g. %sudo apt-get install bla).