I want my Python script to copy files on Vista. When I run it from a normal cmd.exe
window, no errors are generated, yet the files are NOT copied. If I run cmd.exe
"as administator" and then run my script, it works fine.
This makes sense since User Account Control (UAC) normally prevents many file system actions.
Is there a way I can, from within a Python script, invoke a UAC elevation request (those dialogs that say something like "such and such app needs admin access, is this OK?")
If that's not possible, is there a way my script can at least detect that it is not elevated so it can fail gracefully?
Install Python It can be installed without administrators rights through a software named Miniconda. Download miniconda from https://conda.io/miniconda. Make sure to choose the Python 3.7 version for Windows. If you don't know if your system is 32-bit or 64-bit, pick 32-bit.
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:
ctypes
and sys
from standard library.Documentation for the underlying ShellExecute call is here.
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)
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