Loads of Plumbum October 26, 2012
It’s kind of funny how things turn out. I haven’t done any work on Plumbum almost since it was released, back in May, and all of the sudden everything’s happening at fast pace. So version 1.0 was released earlier this month, followed by 1.0.1, which has added support for PuTTY on Windows boxes and various other bug fixes, and now I’m happy to announce that version 1.1 is just around the corner (scheduled for mid-November). This release will add Paramiko support.
So far Plumbum relied on an external SSH client being installed, which it spawned every time you wanted to run a remote process. This approach was easy, but it suffered from the high overhead of setting up a new SSH connection every time (key-exchange, etc.). Using Paramiko, Plumbum now creates a single socket connection over which it spawns processes in separate channels (a feature of SSH)
- so although we’re dealing with a pure-Python implementation of SSH, it’s considerably faster
when multiple remote processes are used. And, as a bonus, we get cheap socket forwarding - we
simply set up a
direct-tcpipchannel (that behaves like a regular socket), which is securely tunneled over the underlying SSH transport.
This easily integrates with RPyC: just run an RPyC server on a remote machine,
binding to localhost (so it won’t accept external connections). Then, create a ParamikoMachine
instance, connected to that host (passing in a keyfile or password if necessary), and call the
connect_sock method of that object. Here’s an example:
>>> import rpyc
>>> from plumbum.paramiko_machine import ParamikoMachine
>>>
>>> m = ParamikoMachine("192.168.1.143")
>>> # connects to 192.168.1.143:18812 over SSH
... conn = rpyc.classic.connect_stream(rpyc.SocketStream(m.connect_sock(18812)))
>>> conn.modules.sys.platform
'linux2'
>>> m.close()
>>> conn.modules.sys.platform
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
EOFError: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptorKeep in mind that these interfaces are unstable and may change before the official release. Moreover,
RPyC 3.3 is likely to add some sort of built-in support for that, something along the lines of
rpyc.classic.connect_paramiko(mach, port).
