tacacs-plus

2.6 verified Mon Apr 27 auth: no python

A client library for TACACS+ authentication. Provides both a low-level network client and a high-level authentication/authorization/accounting interface. Current version 2.6, maintained by the Ansible community. Release cadence is irregular.

pip install tacacs-plus

Common errors

error tacacs_plus.client.TACACSClient.authenticate() got an unexpected keyword argument 'timeout' ↓

cause The 'timeout' argument was added in version 2.3; older versions do not accept it.

fix

Upgrade to version 2.3 or later: pip install --upgrade tacacs-plus

error AttributeError: module 'tacacs_plus' has no attribute 'TACACSClient' ↓

cause Wrong import path: users try to import TACACSClient directly from top-level module.

fix

Use correct import: from tacacs_plus.client import TACACSClient

error TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'str' ↓

cause In Python 3, passing a string where bytes are expected (e.g., secret).

fix

Ensure secret is a string; if you must use bytes, encode it properly: secret=b'secret'.decode() or use str.

Warnings

breaking In version 2.0, the package name changed from 'tacacs' to 'tacacs-plus'. The import path also changed; you must now import from 'tacacs_plus'. ↓

fix Replace 'import tacacs' with 'from tacacs_plus import ...'.

gotcha The secret parameter is mandatory and must be a string, not bytes. Passing bytes results in a TypeError. ↓

fix Ensure secret is a str (e.g., secret='mysecret').

gotcha The timeout parameter is in seconds but may be ignored on some platforms (e.g., Windows) due to socket timeout limitations. ↓

fix Test timeout behavior on your target platform; use a small default (e.g., 5 seconds).

deprecated Python 2.7 support is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. ↓

fix Upgrade to Python 3.

Imports

TACACSClient

from tacacs_plus.client import TACACSClient

Primary high-level client class.

Session
```
from tacacs_plus.session import Session
```
Low-level session handling.
Flags
```
from tacacs_plus.flags import *
```
TACACS+ protocol flags (e.g., TAC_PLUS_AUTHEN_TYPE_ASCII).

Quickstart

Basic TACACS+ authentication example.

from tacacs_plus.client import TACACSClient

client = TACACSClient(
    host='tacacs.example.com',
    port=49,
    secret='shared_secret',
    timeout=5
)
authenticated = client.authenticate(
    username='admin',
    password='supersecret',
    authen_type=1  # ASCII
)
print('Authenticated:', authenticated)