Automate ssh commands with python [closed]

Question

So everyday, I need to login to a couple different hosts via ssh and run some maintenance commands there in order for the QA team to be able to test my features.

I want to use a python script to automate such boring tasks. It would be something like:

• ssh host1
• deploy stuff
• logout from host1
• ssh host2
• restart stuff
• logout from host2
• ssh host3
• check health on stuff
• logout from host3
• ...

It's killing my productivity, and I would like to know if there is something nice, ergonomic and easy to implement that can handle and run commands on ssh sessions programmatically and output a report for me.

Of course I will do the code, I just wanted some suggestions that are not bash scripts (because those are not meant for humans to be read).

Answer 1

You can use the following things programmatically:

• For low-level SSH automation - Paramiko
• For somewhat higher-level automation - Fabric

Alternatively, if your activities are all around automation of typical sysadmin tasks - have a look at orchestration tools:

• Ansible
• Saltstack

To give an example in Fabric, define a task to login to a host and run uname -a:

from fabric import *
from fabric.api import *

env.hosts = ['localhost']

def login_to_host_and_run_uname():
    run('uname -a')

You can run it as a standalone fabric command:

[none][20:03:32] vlazarenko@alluminium (~/tests)$ fab -f fab.py login_to_host_and_run_uname
[localhost] Executing task 'login_to_host_and_run_uname'
[localhost] run: uname -a
[localhost] Passphrase for private key:
[localhost] out: Darwin alluminium 16.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 16.5.0: Tue Jan 31 18:57:20 PST 2017; root:xnu-3789.50.195.1.1~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
[localhost] out:


Done.
Disconnecting from localhost... done.

Fabric also supports easy wrappers for sudo(), caches and works with SSH keys, etc, etc. Allows for easy task parallelisation over multiple hosts and so on.