Avoid Password Prompt with rsync Without Public Keys – SSH Tips

passwordrsyncssh

I need to execute rsync, without it prompting me for password.

I've seen in rsync manpage that it doesn't allow specifying the password as command line argument.
But I noticed that it allows specifying the password via the variable RSYNC_PASSWORD.

So I've tried exporting the variable, but rsync keeps asking me for password. 

export RSYNC_PASSWORD="abcdef"
rsync root@1.2.3.4:/abc /def

What am I doing wrong?

Please consider:

In other words, I need to have the RSYNC_PASSWORD approach working! 🙂

Best Answer

This password environment variable appears only to be used when using the rsync protocol:

rsync rsync://username@1.2.3.4:/abc /def

For this to work, you need to run rsync as a daemon as well (--daemon option), which is often done using inetd.conf.

When using this protocol, abc should correspond to a target defined in /etc/rsyncd.conf. The user name should be present in a auth users line for this target, and a password file should be specified with the secrets file option.

It is this secrets file that contains mappings between user names and passwords in the following format:

username:password

And it is this password that you can specify using the RSYNC_PASSWORD environment variable.

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