ssh-subprocess

ssh-subprocess is a small Python module that provides subprocess -like API for executing commands remotely over SSH. The module depends on OpenSSH for the SSH functionality and requires non-interactive (e.g. public key) authentication.

The module also supports SCP file transfer for uploading and downloading files and directories.

Tutorial

Prepare SSH connection

First establish connection towards remote server:

import ssh_subprocess

ssh = ssh_subprocess.Ssh(host='hostname', user='joe', host_key_checking='no')

Run commands

To execute command:

result = ssh.call('echo "Hello world!" > message')

just like call() in subprocess, call() in ssh-subprocess returns the exit status of the command. In this case it is the exit status of echo command. Also check_call() variant is available. It raises subprocess.CalledProcessError in case of non-zero exit status.

If you want to read the output printed by the remotely executed command:

message = ssh.check_output('cat message')
print message

This will print out the contents of the remote text file:

Hello world!

Lastly, popen() allows also writing to stdin of remotely executed command:

p = ssh.popen('cat', stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
out, err = p.communicate('Hello world!\n') # write 'Hello world!\n' to stdin of 'cat'
print out

See the documentation of subprocess for more information.

Transfer files

Files and directories can be uploaded and downloaded by using upload() and download():

ssh.upload('myfile', '/tmp/myfile.txt')
ssh.download('/home/joe/myfiles', '.', recursive=True)