pythonwindowswindows-vistauac

Request UAC elevation from within a Python script?


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?


Solution

  • 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:

    Documentation for the underlying ShellExecute call is here.