PythonSSHLocalhost

Start your own ssh client on localhost with python

Python 3 port of the original python 2 script by michaellihs based on the discussion in the comments of the original script.

Installing the library

Assuming you have Python 3 installed on your system:

pip install twisted
pip install pyOpenSSL
pip install service_identity

RSA Keys

For convenience, you can store the RSA keys in the keys folder

To generate them, make a keys folder and run

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "server" -f keys/id_rsa_localhost

If you want to test also key-based user authentication, also run

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "client" -f keys/id_rsa_client

Start the server

python3 start_local_ssh_server.py

Connect to the server

In another shell, run

ssh user@localhost -p 22222
 
((password 'password'))
 
>>> Welcome to my test SSH server.
Commands: clear echo help quit whoami
$

If you generated client keys this should also work

ssh key_user@localhost -p 22222 -i id_rsa_client

Testing commands

The above server is implemented in such a way, that it outputs all commands to STDOUT of the python process running the ssh server. This may be useful for testing the commands sent to the server.

The shell will run any command for which the do_command method is defined in SSHDemoProtocol . An example is

def do_echo(self, *args):
       self.terminal.write(" ".join(args))
       self.terminal.nextLine()

which runs as

$ echo a
a
$