Running interactive commands in Paramiko

The full paramiko distribution ships with a lot of good demos.

In the demos subdirectory, demo.py and interactive.py have full interactive TTY examples which would probably be overkill for your situation.

In your example above ssh_stdin acts like a standard Python file object, so ssh_stdin.write should work so long as the channel is still open.

I've never needed to write to stdin, but the docs suggest that a channel is closed as soon as a command exits, so using the standard stdin.write method to send a password up probably won't work. There are lower level paramiko commands on the channel itself that give you more control - see how the SSHClient.exec_command method is implemented for all the gory details.

I had the same problem trying to make an interactive ssh session using ssh, a fork of Paramiko.

I dug around and found this article:

Updated link (last version before the link generated a 404): http://web.archive.org/web/20170912043432/http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/05/ssh-programming-with-paramiko-completely-different/

To continue your example you could do

ssh_stdin, ssh_stdout, ssh_stderr = ssh.exec_command("psql -U factory -d factory -f /tmp/data.sql")
ssh_stdin.write('password\n')
ssh_stdin.flush()
output = ssh_stdout.read()

The article goes more in depth, describing a fully interactive shell around exec_command. I found this a lot easier to use than the examples in the source.

Original link: http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/05/ssh-programming-with-paramiko-completely-different/