Using sudo with Python script

To pass the password to sudo's stdin:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

sudo_password = 'mypass'
command = 'mount -t vboxsf myfolder /home/myuser/myfolder'.split()

p = Popen(['sudo', '-S'] + command, stdin=PIPE, stderr=PIPE,
          universal_newlines=True)
sudo_prompt = p.communicate(sudo_password + '\n')[1]

Note: you could probably configure passwordless sudo or SUDO_ASKPASS command instead of hardcoding your password in the source code.

Many answers focus on how to make your solution work, while very few suggest that your solution is a very bad approach. If you really want to "practice to learn", why not practice using good solutions? Hardcoding your password is learning the wrong approach!

If what you really want is a password-less mount for that volume, maybe sudo isn't needed at all! So may I suggest other approaches?

• Use /etc/fstab as mensi suggested. Use options user and noauto to let regular users mount that volume.

• Use Polkit for passwordless actions: Configure a .policy file for your script with <allow_any>yes</allow_any> and drop at /usr/share/polkit-1/actions

• Edit /etc/sudoers to allow your user to use sudo without typing your password. As @Anders suggested, you can restrict such usage to specific commands, thus avoiding unlimited passwordless root priviledges in your account. See this answer for more details on /etc/sudoers.

All the above allow passwordless root privilege, none require you to hardcode your password. Choose any approach and I can explain it in more detail.

As for why it is a very bad idea to hardcode passwords, here are a few good links for further reading:

• Why You Shouldn’t Hard Code Your Passwords When Programming
• How to keep secrets secret (Alternatives to Hardcoding Passwords)
• What's more secure? Hard coding credentials or storing them in a database?
• Use of hard-coded credentials, a dangerous programming error: CWE
• Hard-coded passwords remain a key security flaw

sudoPassword = 'mypass'
command = 'mount -t vboxsf myfolder /home/myuser/myfolder'
p = os.system('echo %s|sudo -S %s' % (sudoPassword, command))

Try this and let me know if it works. :-)

And this one:

os.popen("sudo -S %s"%(command), 'w').write('mypass')