CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonshellremote-server
mnm
mnm

Reputation: 2022

How to prompt user to enter path to a remote server in python?

Use case: There is a certain file located on a remote server. Instead of hard coding the path to that file in my program I would like to be prompted by the program to let me specify the path to that directory on the remote server. This will help in program portability. I am able to connect to remote server in pyCharm 4.5 professional edition. Using SFTP to connect to remote server in pyCharm. Password or keyfile is not an issue to be concerned with at least for now.

Question: the function raw_input() works for local interpreter. But what method do I use to prompt the user to enter the directory path to a file located in a remote server?

For now I am hard-coding the file path in the program like 

input_file="/home/ashish/PyCharm_proj/raw_data/all_user_and_tweets_only_raw.csv"

I also tried the following code which off course does not work when executed on the remote server

import os,sys
user_input = raw_input("Enter the path of your file (use \: ")
assert os.path.exists(user_input), "I did not find the file at,  "+str(user_input)
input_file = open(user_input,'r+')
print("Hooray we found your file!")

Similar questions are 1,2,3,4 but I could not find anything relevant that satisfies my use case. Any suggestions to solve this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1381

Answers (2)

selllikesybok
selllikesybok

Reputation: 1225

So, the question was a bit unclear at first. OP was ultimately looking for a way to give input to his script about the location (known) of a file on a remote server.

OP tried raw_input but got an unspecified error.

Further discussion in comments reveals the original approach was correct for this use case. The error was in an unrelated section of code, where OP used the same identifier for the input string and the file object, resulting in trying to open the file object.

Upvotes: 1

Maelstrom
Maelstrom

Reputation: 453

To validate the file exists on remote host/server you need a way to connect to that host. There are many different ways depending on your situation.

  • From your description above it looks like you have ssh access to the remote system? In this case Paramiko can be used to connect via ssh and execute remote command
  • If the remote host files are published on a website via HTTP you can verify it via URL, but beware that this may not reflect the remote host full path since it depends on HTTP root.

So it really depends on your case.

If using paramiko, one of the easiest way is to use SFTP class. Something like this:

ssh_client = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh_client.connect(host, port, user, password)
sftp = ssh_client.open_sftp()
file_stat = sftp.stat(path)           # can use stat
try:
    sftp_obj1 = sftp.file(path)   # or use file
    sftp_obj2 = sftp.open(path)   # or use open
except:
    print "Error! File not found!"

Upvotes: 3

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