The Python Paramiko library

Paramiko is a Python implementation of the SSHv2 protocol. Just like the pxssh subclass of Pexpect, Paramiko simplifies the SSHv2 interaction with the remote device. Unlike pxssh, Paramiko is only focused on SSHv2 and provides both client and server operations.

Paramiko is the low-level SSH client behind the high-level automation framework Ansible for its network modules. We will cover Ansible in the later chapters, so first, let's take a look at the Paramiko library.

Installating Paramiko

Installating Paramiko is pretty straight forward with PIP. However, there is a hard dependency on the Cryptography library. The library provides the low-level, C-based encryption algorithms for the SSH protocol.

Note

The installation instruction for Windows, Mac, and other flavors of Linux can be found https://cryptography.io/en/latest/installation/

We will show the installation for our Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine in the following output. The following output shows the installation...