Paramiko error when trying to edit file: “sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified”

Question

I am using Paramiko to SSH and edit a config file. The file itself needs sudo permissions to edit. This hasn\'t been a problem so far, as I\'ve just done echo

Answer 1

If you read the error message

sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified

then you can easily find the solution: add the -t option to your ssh command:

-t
Force pseudo-terminal allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine, which can be very useful, e.g. when implementing menu services. Multiple -t options force tty allocation, even if ssh has no local tty.

This has been discussed before:

• How to fix 'sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified' error?
• sudoers NOPASSWD: sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified

Regarding Paramiko, there have been related questions, with a couple of different approaches:

• use the get_pty method of the ssh Channel to obtain a pseudo-terminal (which is analogous to telling ssh to do this)
• use the -S option of sudo, and send the password on your standard output.

For discussion, see the suggested answers here:

• Paramiko and Pseudo-tty Allocation
• Nested SSH session with Paramiko