using sudo inside jupyter notebook's cell

Update: I checked all the methods, all of them are working.

1:

Request password using getpass module which essentially hides input by user and then run sudo command in python.

 import getpass import os password = getpass.getpass() command = "sudo -S apt-get update" #can be any command but don't forget -S as it enables input from stdin os.system('echo %s | %s' % (password, command))

2:

 import getpass import os password = getpass.getpass() command = "sudo -S apt-get update" # can be any command but don't forget -S as it enables input from stdin os.popen(command, 'w').write(password+'\n') # newline char is important otherwise prompt will wait for you to manually perform newline

NOTE for above methods:

The field where you enter the password may not appear in the ipython notebook. It appears in the terminal window on a mac, and I imagine it will appear in a command shell on a PC. Even the result details would appear in the terminal.

3:

You can store your password in mypasswordfile file and just type in cell :

!sudo -S apt-get install blah < /pathto/mypasswordfile # again -S is important here

I would prefer this method if I want to view output of the command in jupyter notebook itself.

References:

1. Requesting password in IPython notebook

2. https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/getpass.html

3. Using sudo with Python script

You can pass python variables from a notebook to the shell without importing the os or subprocess modules by using the {varname} syntax (e.g. this cool blog).

If you have defined a password and command variable in python (see Suparshva's answer) then you can run this one-liner:

!echo {password}|sudo -S {command}

The exclamation mark tells jupyter to run it in the shell, the echo command will then get the real password (e.g. 'funkymonkey') from the variable called password and then pipe it into the sudo'd command variable (which is a string that describes a shell command, e.g. 'apt-get update').

I want to point another possibility for the case where jupyter is running on localhost: instead of sudo, use pkexec (or for older systems gksu):

!pkexec apt-get install blah

This will ask for the password in a gui solving the problem...