How can I set a users password in linux from a python script?

Question

I\'m trying to automate the setup of SFTP access. This script is running as a user with sudo permissions and no password.

I can create a user like so:

Answer 1

The documentation for communicate says that you'll need to add stdin=PIPE if you're sending data to standard input via the communicate parameter:

http://docs.python.org/release/2.6/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.communicate

I appreciate this is just skeleton code, but here are another couple of other small comments, in case they are of use:

• If you're not interested in the output of the useradd command other than whether it failed or not, you might be better off using subprocess.check_call which will raise an exception if the command returns non-zero.
• In the second case, you should check whether process.returncode is 0 after your call to communicate('test:password')

Answer 2

I guess the issue is that you forgot the -S option for sudo.

Answer 3

On Ubuntu, use usermod

class SomeClass
    def userPasswd(self, login, password):
        encPass = crypt.crypt(password)
        command = "usermod -p '{0:s}' {1:s}".format(encPass, login)
        result = os.system(command)
        if result != 0:
            logging.error(command)
        return result

Answer 4

Try below code which will do as you required automation

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, check_call  
check_call(['useradd', 'test'])   
proc=Popen(['passwd', 'test'],stdin=PIPE,stdout=PIPE,stderr=PIPE)  
proc.stdin.write('password\n')  
proc.stdin.write('password')  
proc.stdin.flush()  
stdout,stderr = proc.communicate()  
print stdout  
print stderr

print statements are optional.

Answer 5

You forgot this:

stdin=subprocess.PIPE

To send data to the process, you need a stdin.

So the full statement is:

process = subprocess.Popen(['sudo', 'chpasswd'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

and then call communicate('password').