tramp-auto-auth

TRAMP automatic authentication library

This library provides tramp-auto-auth-mode: a global minor mode whose purpose is to automatically feed TRAMP sub-processes with passwords for paths matching regexps. This is useful in situations where interactive user input is not desirable or feasible. For instance, in sub-nets with large number of hosts or whose hosts have dynamic IPs assigned to them. In those cases it’s not practical to query passwords using the auth-source library directly, since this would require each host to be listed explicitly and immutably in a Netrc file. Another scenario where this mode is useful are non-interactive Emacs sessions (like those used for batch processing or by evaluating :async Org Babel source blocks) in which it’s impossible for the user to answer a password-asking prompt.

When a TRAMP prompt is encountered, tramp-auto-auth-mode queries the alist tramp-auto-auth-alist for the auth-source spec value whose regexp key matches the correspondent TRAMP path. This spec is then used to query the auth-source library for a presumably phony entry exclusively dedicated to the whole class of TRAMP paths matching that regexp.

To make use of the automatic authentication feature, on the Lisp side the variable tramp-auto-auth-alist must be customized to hold the path regexps and their respective auth-source specs, and then tramp-auto-auth-mode must be enabled. For example:

~/.emacs.el

(require 'tramp-auto-auth)

(add-to-list
 'tramp-auto-auth-alist
 '("root@10\\.0\\." .
   (:host "Funny-Machines" :user "root" :port "ssh")))

(tramp-auto-auth-mode)

After this, just put the respective sacred secret in an authentication source supported by auth-source library. For instance:

~/.authinfo.gpg

machine Funny-Machines login root password "$r00tP#sWD!" port ssh

In case you are feeling lazy or the secret is not so secret (nor so sacred) -- or for any reason you need to do it all from Lisp -- it’s enough to:

(auth-source-remember '(:host "Funny-Machines" :user "root" :port "ssh")
		         '((:secret "$r00tP#sWD!")))

And happy TRAMPing!