sshtunnel doesn't recognize private key password

Question

I'm using sshtunnel to connect to connect to a remote server and on to a database from there. Everything is working fine, except that sshtunnel doesn't seem to recognize my ssh_private_key_password unless I've already entered it elsewhere (or more likely I'm making a mistake when providing it).

with SSHTunnelForwarder(
    ('my.server', 22),
    ssh_username="myUsername",
    ssh_pkey="~/.ssh/id_rsa", 
    ssh_private_key_password="myPassword",
    remote_bind_address=("other.server", 3306)
) as server:
{do some stuff}

If I log into "my.server" separately and enter my private key password in the dialog for storage by ssh-agent, and then run the code above, it works as expected.

If I run the code without having already logged into the server at some point earlier, I receive this error: ValueError: No password or public key available! (But the password is there - ssh_private_key_password - no?)

This happens whether ssh_pkey is pointing to the public key or the private key.

What might be happening here? Am I misunderstanding something about the expected arguments for SSHTunnelForwarder? Something more fundamental about the key and password?

Answer 1

Maybe you should add the private key

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa