Installing sshpass On OSX Mavericks

Installing sshpass On OSX Mavericks

16th February 2014 - 4 minutes read time

When setting up a server for the first time with Ansible you will need to pass ssh credentials to Ansible directly to set up ssh keys. This is done by the use of the sshpass program which allows Ansible to pass your user credentials directly to ssh in order to open a connection to the server. The sshpass program is easily installed on Linux systems with the apt or yum package managers, but on OSX you will need to install it manually.

In order to install command line software on OSX you will need some of the command line tools bundled with Xcode. Xcode and the command line tools are free programs from Apple and is available on the Appstore. Once Xcode is installed you will need to open it and install the command line tools. You can do this by going to Preferences > Downloads > Command Line Tools and clicking on the Install button. Once everything is installed and setup you can continue with the installation of sshpass.

The sshpass program is an open source project, currently available on sourceforge. You can either download the latest version manually and or you can use the following command will download the sshpass tar from sourceforge, and unzip it.

curl -O -L http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/sshpass/sshpass/1.05/sshpass-1.05.tar.gz && tar xvzf sshpass-1.05.tar.gz

This will create a directory called 'sshpass-1.05', open this directory in your terminal and run the following commands. This will configure, compile and install the sshpass program.

./configure
make
sudo make install

Once complete you can run sshpass with the -V flag to see if the install has taken and also to view the current version installed.

$ sshpass -V
sshpass 1.05 (C) 2006-2011 Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
This program is free software, and can be distributed under the terms of the GPL
See the COPYING file for more information.

I should note that it is poor security practice to rely on the sshpass to interface with servers, even through Ansible. This is because you will be placing ssh credentials into the command line or even within your codebase.

SSH
Ansible

Comments

Haha, I just tried to install it via Homebrew:$ brew search sshpass We won't add sshpass because it makes it too easy for novice SSH users to ruin SSH's security.

Submitted by Ron on Mon, 02/17/2014 - 02:43

Permalink
you can do
brew install https://raw.github.com/eugeneoden/homebrew/eca9de1/Library/Formula/sshpass.rb

Submitted by Chris McCoy on Wed, 04/09/2014 - 05:55

Permalink
Hi Phil, Thanks for putting this together! I'm provisioning a lot of new servers and I've got to log into 1000+ servers and this will do the trick for my scripts. I had hoped for a DMG but this was just as simple - Thanks for putting this post together! Much appreciated, Jay

Submitted by Jay on Fri, 09/05/2014 - 17:01

Permalink
Thanks!

Submitted by Richard Clayton on Fri, 03/27/2015 - 16:47

Permalink
$ brew install https://raw.github.com/eugeneoden/homebrew/eca9de1/Library/Formula/sshpass.rb ######################################################################## 100.0% ==> Downloading http://sourceforge.net/projects/sshpass/files/sshpass/1.05/sshpass-1.05.tar.gz ######################################################################## 100.0% Error: MD5 support has been dropped for security reasons. Please switch this formula to SHA256.

Submitted by Eduard on Thu, 04/09/2015 - 18:58

Permalink
Same error

Submitted by zq on Thu, 04/23/2015 - 03:02

Permalink
How did you solve it?
Philip Norton

Submitted by philipnorton42 on Thu, 04/23/2015 - 09:27

Permalink
On Yoshemite$ brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kadwanev/bigboybrew/master/Library/Formula/sshpass.rb ######################################################################## 100.0% ==> Downloading http://sourceforge.net/projects/sshpass/files/sshpass/1.05/sshpass-1.05.tar.gz Already downloaded: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/sshpass-1.05.tar.gz Error: SHA256 mismatch Expected: c3f78752a68a0c3f62efb3332cceea0c8a1f04f7cf6b46e00ec0c3000bc8483e Actual: 96ca20a16a86083b1eb666fecbfa5b3f9eb7317ec9e6fcfcae5a91d96777b767 Archive: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/sshpass-1.05.tar.gz To retry an incomplete download, remove the file above.

Submitted by Askar on Thu, 06/04/2015 - 06:16

Permalink
It works, thanks

Submitted by Yann de Champlain on Wed, 09/02/2015 - 14:24

Permalink
Hi, i have upgraded the Mac to 10.11. When i try to install the sshpass using above commands, i get the following message after the make install command. I see that sshpass is not installed. Any idea what is missing on new Mac ? Please note that I have installed the x-code command line tools. /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 sshpass.1 '/usr/local/share/man/man1'ocal/share/man/man1"

Submitted by Jagadeesh on Tue, 11/17/2015 - 12:26

Permalink
Thanks for article, this is work's for me.

Submitted by Dika Fernando on Tue, 11/29/2016 - 18:10

Permalink

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Related Content

Adding iptables Rules With Ansible

16th February 2014

Many systems and applications require certain access to certain ports and protocols. When installing these systems using Ansible it is necessary to also open up the needed ports so that the systems can function correctly. As there is no iptables module in Ansible the shell command is needed to add the iptables rules.

Read more

Ansible SSH Setup Playbook

14th January 2014

It is best practice to use Ansible with SSH keys in order to create the SSH connections to the servers. This does require a little bit of extra setup before hand in order to ensure that the server can be reached by Ansible via SSH keys alone. As I have been doing this quite a lot recently I decided to package the setup steps into an Ansible playbook.

Read more

Ansible: The Automation Engine

23rd December 2013

Ansible is a automation and provisioning tool that makes it easy to configure systems with the needed software, configuration options and even content. It is a command line tool, written in Python, that uses SSH connections to run these actions.

Read more

Creating Mac OSX Aliases

10th November 2012

Adding an alias to your system is a good way of saving time when remembering complex commands. You can reduce a command down to a quick two letter command that is easy to remember.

The alias command can be used to assign an alias on the fly. You can create an alias to 'ls -lah' by typing in the following into the command line.

Read more