Request UAC elevation from within a Python script?
It took me a little while to get dguaraglia's answer working, so in the interest of saving others time, here's what I did to implement this idea:
import os
import sys
import win32com.shell.shell as shell
ASADMIN = 'asadmin'
if sys.argv[-1] != ASADMIN:
script = os.path.abspath(sys.argv[0])
params = ' '.join([script] + sys.argv[1:] + [ASADMIN])
shell.ShellExecuteEx(lpVerb='runas', lpFile=sys.executable, lpParameters=params)
sys.exit(0)
As of 2017, an easy method to achieve this is the following:
import ctypes, sys
def is_admin():
try:
return ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin()
except:
return False
if is_admin():
# Code of your program here
else:
# Re-run the program with admin rights
ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteW(None, "runas", sys.executable, " ".join(sys.argv), None, 1)
If you are using Python 2.x, then you should replace the last line for:
ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteW(None, u"runas", unicode(sys.executable), unicode(" ".join(sys.argv)), None, 1)
Also note that if you converted you python script into an executable file (using tools like py2exe
, cx_freeze
, pyinstaller
) then you should use sys.argv[1:]
instead of sys.argv
in the fourth parameter.
Some of the advantages here are:
- No external libraries required. It only uses
ctypes
andsys
from standard library. - Works on both Python 2 and Python 3.
- There is no need to modify the file resources nor creating a manifest file.
- If you don't add code below if/else statement, the code won't ever be executed twice.
- You can get the return value of the API call in the last line and take an action if it fails (code <= 32). Check possible return values here.
- You can change the display method of the spawned process modifying the sixth parameter.
Documentation for the underlying ShellExecute call is here.