Paramiko-NG

This is a fork of paramiko for more active maintenance.

This is still imported under the name paramiko, but you can install with the pip-package-name paramiko-ng (default) or paramiko (by setting the environment variable PARAMIKO_REPLACE, see Installation).

Changelog: releases

Paramiko-NG

Python SSH module

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2003-2009 Robey Pointer <robeypointer@gmail.com>

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2013-2019 Jeff Forcier <jeff@bitprophet.org>

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2019-2022 Pierce Lopez <pierce.lopez@gmail.com>

License

LGPL

API docs

https://ploxiln.github.io/paramiko-ng/

Development

https://github.com/ploxiln/paramiko-ng/

What

"Paramiko" is a combination of the Esperanto words for "paranoid" and "friend". It's a module for Python 2.7/3.4+ that implements the SSH2 protocol for secure (encrypted and authenticated) connections to remote machines. Unlike SSL (aka TLS), SSH2 protocol does not require hierarchical certificates signed by a powerful central authority. You may know SSH2 as the protocol that replaced Telnet and rsh for secure access to remote shells, but the protocol also includes the ability to open arbitrary channels to remote services across the encrypted tunnel (this is how SFTP works, for example).

It is written entirely in Python (though it depends on third-party C wrappers for low level crypto; these are often available precompiled) and is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

Installation

The import name is still just paramiko. Make sure the original paramiko is not installed before installing paramiko-ng - otherwise pip may report success even though paramiko-ng was not correctly installed. (Because the import name is the same, installed files can conflict.)

The most common way to install is simply:

pip install paramiko-ng

You can also install under the original "paramiko" pip-package-name, in order to satisfy requirements for other packages (replace "2.8.10" with desired version):

PARAMIKO_REPLACE=1 pip install "https://github.com/ploxiln/paramiko-ng/archive/2.8.10.tar.gz#egg=paramiko"

For dependencies and other details, see https://ploxiln.github.io/paramiko-ng/installing.html

Portability Issues

Paramiko primarily supports POSIX platforms with standard OpenSSH implementations, and is most frequently tested on Linux and OS X. Windows is supported as well, though it may not be as straightforward.

Bugs & Support

Bug Reports

Github

IRC

#paramiko on Freenode

Demo

Several demo scripts come with Paramiko to demonstrate how to use it. Probably the simplest demo is this:

import base64
import paramiko
key = paramiko.RSAKey(data=base64.b64decode(b'AAA...'))
client = paramiko.SSHClient()
client.get_host_keys().add('ssh.example.com', 'ssh-rsa', key)
client.connect('ssh.example.com', username='strongbad', password='thecheat')
stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command('ls')
for line in stdout:
    print('... ' + line.strip('\n'))
client.close()

This prints out the results of executing ls on a remote server. The host key b'AAA...' should of course be replaced by the actual base64 encoding of the host key. If you skip host key verification, the connection is not secure!

The following example scripts (in demos/) get progressively more detailed:

demo_simple.py

Calls invoke_shell() and emulates a terminal/TTY through which you can execute commands interactively on a remote server. Think of it as a poor man's SSH command-line client.

demo.py

Same as demo_simple.py, but allows you to authenticate using a private key, attempts to use an SSH agent if present, and uses the long form of some of the API calls.

forward.py

Command-line script to set up port-forwarding across an SSH transport.

demo_sftp.py

Opens an SFTP session and does a few simple file operations.

demo_server.py

An SSH server that listens on port 2200 and accepts a login for 'robey' (password 'foo'), and pretends to be a BBS. Meant to be a very simple demo of writing an SSH server.

demo_keygen.py

A key generator similar to OpenSSH ssh-keygen(1) program with Paramiko keys generation and progress functions.

Use

The demo scripts are probably the best example of how to use this package.

A much easier alternative to using paramiko-ng directly is to use fab-classic or Fabric 2.x (or, for managed networking equipment, netmiko). Whereas recent releases of fab-classic depend on paramiko-ng directly, to use this with Fabric or netmiko you need to install paramiko-ng with the pip-package-name "paramiko", using the PARAMIKO_REPLACE environment variable as described above in Installation.

There are also unit tests which will verify that most of the components are working correctly:

$ pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
$ pytest -v