How to pass password automatically for rsync SSH command?

Question

I need to do rsync by ssh and want to do it automatically without the need of passing password for ssh manually.

Answer 1

Use a ssh key.

Look at ssh-keygen and ssh-copy-id.

After that you can use an rsync this way :

rsync -a --stats --progress --delete /home/path server:path

Answer 2

I got it to work like this:

sshpass -p "password" rsync -ae "ssh -p remote_port_ssh" /local_dir  remote_user@remote_host:/remote_dir

Answer 3

You can avoid the password prompt on rsync command by setting the environment variable RSYNC_PASSWORD to the password you want to use or using the --password-file option.

Answer 4

If you can't use a public/private keys, you can use expect:

#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn rsync SRC DEST
expect "password:"
send "PASS\n"
expect eof
if [catch wait] {
    puts "rsync failed"
    exit 1
}
exit 0

You will need to replace SRC and DEST with your normal rsync source and destination parameters, and replace PASS with your password. Just make sure this file is stored securely!

Answer 5

Though you've already implemented it by now,

you can also use any expect implementation (you'll find alternatives in Perl, Python: pexpect, paramiko, etc..)

Answer 6

The official solution (and others) were incomplete when I first visited, so I came back, years later, to post this alternate approach in case any others wound up here intending to use a public/private key-pair:

Execute this from the target backup machine, which pulls from source to target backup

rsync -av --delete -e 'ssh -p 59333 -i /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa' user@10.9.9.3:/home/user/Server/ /home/keith/Server/

Execute this from the source machine, which sends from source to target backup

rsync -av --delete -e 'ssh -p 59333 -i /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa' /home/user/Server/ user@10.9.9.3:/home/user/Server/

And, if you are not using an alternate port for ssh, then consider the more elegant examples below:

Execute this from the target backup machine, which pulls from source to target backup:

sudo rsync -avi --delete user@10.9.9.3:/var/www/ /media/sdb1/backups/www/

Execute this from the source machine, which sends from source to target backup:

sudo rsync -avi --delete /media/sdb1/backups/www/ user@10.9.9.3:/var/www/

If you are still getting prompted for a password, then you need to check your ssh configuration in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and verify that the users in source and target each have the others' respective public ssh key by sending each over with ssh-copy-id user@10.9.9.3.

(Again, this is for using ssh key-pairs without a password, as an alternate approach, and not for passing the password over via a file.)