Perform commands over ssh with Python

I'm writing a script to automate some command line commands in Python. At the moment, I'm doing calls like this:

cmd = "some unix command"
retcode = subprocess.call(cmd,shell=True)

However, I need to run some commands on a remote machine. Manually, I would log in using ssh and then run the commands. How would I automate this in Python? I need to log in with a (known) password to the remote machine, so I can't just use cmd = ssh user@remotehost, I'm wondering if there's a module I should be using?

I will refer you to paramiko

see this question

ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.connect(server, username=username, password=password)
ssh_stdin, ssh_stdout, ssh_stderr = ssh.exec_command(cmd_to_execute)

If you are using ssh keys, do:

k = paramiko.RSAKey.from_private_key_file(keyfilename)
# OR k = paramiko.DSSKey.from_private_key_file(keyfilename)

ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
ssh.connect(hostname=host, username=user, pkey=k)

Or you can just use commands.getstatusoutput:

   commands.getstatusoutput("ssh machine 1 'your script'")

I used it extensively and it works great.

In Python 2.6+, use subprocess.check_output.

Keep it simple. No libraries required.

import subprocess

subprocess.Popen("ssh {user}@{host} {cmd}".format(user=user, host=host, cmd='ls -l'), shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()

I found paramiko to be a bit too low-level, and Fabric not especially well-suited to being used as a library, so I put together my own library called spur that uses paramiko to implement a slightly nicer interface:

import spur

shell = spur.SshShell(hostname="localhost", username="bob", password="password1")
result = shell.run(["echo", "-n", "hello"])
print result.output # prints hello

If you need to run inside a shell:

shell.run(["sh", "-c", "echo -n hello"])