SSH Commander

This Command Line Interface (CLI) tool, allows you to execute various commands on several remote hosts, using the SSH protocol. As a result, you get a per-host generated output of each command you specified.

You simply specify a plain text file with a list of remote hosts to connect to (domain names or IP addresses), and a comma-separated list of commands to execute on those. Note that access credentials (user and password) must be the same for all the target hosts!.

Highlights and features

• Key-based authentication support (>= v0.3)
• Multithreaded sessions (>= v0.2).
• Almost no setup required, after installed!.
• Easy to use CLI syntax.
• Colorized output (>= v0.2)!.

Requirements

Make sure your system meets the following requirements:

• Python 3 (>= 3.7)
• paramiko (tested with v2.7.2)
• colorama (tested with v0.4.4)
• coloredlogs (tested with v15.0)

Installation

The recommended method for installing this tool, is using pip:

pip install ssh-commander

Usage

When using ssh-commander, respect the following syntax:

usage: ssh-commander [-h] [-p [PORT]] [-i IDENTITY_FILE] [-T] [-v]
                     FILE USER COMMANDS

Excecute commands on several remote hosts, with SSH.

positional arguments:
  FILE                  Plain text file with list of hosts
  USER                  User to login on remote hosts
  COMMANDS              Comma separated commands to be executed on remote
                        hosts

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p [PORT], --port [PORT]
                        Specify SSH port to connect to hosts
  -i IDENTITY_FILE, --identity_file IDENTITY_FILE
                        Public key auth file
  -T, --trust_unknown   Trust hosts with no entries at known_hosts file 
  -v, --version         Show current version

Setup your targeted hosts

First, remember to create a text file (name it whatever you like), where you list the target hosts. Its content, may look like this:

# This is a comment. It'll be ignored!.
192.168.0.10
192.168.0.11
192.168.0.12

Authentication

Since v0.3, ssh-commander supports the following authentication methods:

• Password-based authentication.
• SSH key-based authentication.

In this regard, ssh-commander tries to mimmick the OpenSSH client default behaviour. In practical terms, this means that:

• If any valid key file is found at ~/.ssh/, it'll attempt a key-based authentication on all the targeted hosts!.
• If no valid key file is found nor provided, you'll be asked for a password, to be used as the authentication method for all remote hosts.

In any case, both the SSH key or the provided password, should be valid on ALL the targeted hosts, for doing the authentication!.

Password-based authentication

A password is prompted ONLY if no previous valid key file was found, at default location (~/.ssh/). When using password-based authentication, note that the latter, is gonna be asked only once. Therefore, remember that those credentials, should be valid on all targeted hosts!.

SSH key-based authentication

As explained previously, firstly, ssh-commander will try a key-based authentication, by looking for valid keys at the ~/.ssh/ directory.

The following types of keys are looked for:

• id_dsa
• id_ecdsa
• id_ed25519
• id_rsa

An alternative key file location, can be specified by using the -i CLI option!.

Known hosts validation

By default, ssh-commander will take a look at the ~/.ssh/known_hosts file and check that each targeted host, has a matching entry in it. If it doesn't, it'll warn you and ask for an explicit confirmation, about whether you trust each of those hosts anyway or not!.

Note that if you answer negatively to the trust confirmation, nothing is done and the program exits with a notification.

If you don't want this validation to be performed, you can use the -T option, to blindly trust the remote hosts!.

Examples

Let's say you have some managed switches (or routers):

ssh-commander hosts.txt root "terminal length 0, sh port-security"

They could rather be some GNU/Linux servers, as well:

ssh-commander hosts.txt foones "hostname, whoami"

Do not validate remote hosts against the known_hosts file:

ssh-commander -T hosts.txt foones "hostname, whoami"

Specify an alternative SSH key file location, for key-based authentication:

ssh-commander -i ~/ssh_keys/id_rsa hosts.txt foones "hostname, whoami"

License

This program is licensed under the GPLv3.