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

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)

---

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.