python libraries for ssh handling

Question

I'm going to write first code for handling ssh commands on python and I did search over the stackoverflow and can see that there are several python libraries that can be used for handling commands passed through ssh, like paramiko, pexpect and perhaps some others.

Particularly, I will need to read content of the files from the remote server, copy files through ssh/scp, get output from remote server after starting the script on remote server.

Perhaps some experts could advice what library is better and specify advantages or disadvantages?

Answer 1

Since you're not doing anything special at the protocol level, you presumably don't need the protocol to be entirely implemented in python, and you could simply run ssh/scp commands using the subprocess module.

import subprocess subprocess.check_call(['ssh', 'server', 'command']) subprocess.check_call(['scp', 'server:file', 'file']) 

Answer 2

Libraries, Wrappers:

2. http://www.lag.net/paramiko/

   #!/usr/bin/env python import paramiko from contextlib import contextmanager host = '192.168.10.142' username = 'slacker' password = 'password' def create_ssh(host=host, username=username, password=password):     ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()     ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())      try:        print "creating connection"        ssh.connect(host, username=username, password=password)        print "connected"        yield ssh     finally:        print "closing connection"        ssh.close()        print "closed" 

1) utilizes the 2) and provides some higher level functions. If the latter suit your requirements, I'd suggest trying out 1)

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Update: 1) is gone now (2017-09-12)

1. http://media.commandline.org.uk/code/ssh.txt (example usage: https://zeth.net/archive/2008/05/29/sftp-python-really-simple-ssh/)

   s = ssh.Connection('example.com', 'warrior', password = 'lennalenna') s.put('/home/warrior/hello.txt', '/home/zombie/textfiles/report.txt') s.get('/var/log/strange.log', '/home/warrior/serverlog.txt') s.execute('ls -l') s.close() 

Note: The code examples above are provided just for getting an impression; the code is not tested.