Librarian

An Elixir SSH library

Elixir's SSH offering needs a major revamp. :librarian provides a module, SSH, that is well-typed, and, under the hood, uses Elixir's Stream module.

Librarian does not create any worker pools or have any opinions on how you should manage processes or supervision trees. Future releases may provide batteries-included solutions for these concerns, but Librarian will never instantiate running processes in your BEAM without an explicit command to do so. Currently, because librarian uses Stream it cannot multiplex ssh channels on a single BEAM process, but support for those uses cases may be forthcoming.

Usage

Warning the app :librarian defines the SSH module. We can't call the package :ssh due to conflicts with the erlang :ssh builtin module.

Supported Platforms

:librarian is currently only tested on linux. MacOSX should in theory work, and there are parts that will probably not work on Windows. Any assistance getting these platforms up and running would be appreciated.

For Mix Tasks and releases

If you would like to use Librarian in Mix Tasks or Releases, you should make sure that Application.ensure_all_running(:ssh) has been called before you attempt any Librarian commands, or else you may wind up with a race condition, since OTP may take a while to get its default :ssh package up and running.

Examples

NB all of these commands assume that you have passwordless ssh keys to the server "some.other.server", to the user with the same username as the currently running BEAM VM. For help with other uses, consult the documentation.

  {:ok, conn} = SSH.connect("some.other.server")
  SSH.run!(conn, "echo hello ssh")  # ==> "hello ssh"

Librarian provides two scp-related commands, fetch and send, which let you fetch or send individual files.

  remote_file_binary_content = "some.other.server"
  |> SSH.connect!
  |> SSH.fetch!("remote_file.txt")

  "some.other.server"
  |> SSH.connect!
  |> SSH.send!("foo bar", "remote_foo_bar.txt")

For all three of these operations, Librarian provides an ok tuple form or a bang form. See the documentation for the details on these forms.

Finally, you can use the underlying SSH stream functionality directly, by emitting a stream of values:

  "some.other.server"
  |> SSH.connect!
  |> SSH.stream!("some_long_running_process")
  |> Enum.each(SomeModule.some_action/1)

Like the IO.Stream struct, the SSH.Stream struct emitted by SSH.stream!/2 is both an Enumerable and a Collectable, so you can use it to accept a datastream to send to the standard in of your remote ssh command.

  conn = SSH.connect!("some.other.server")
  1..1000
  |> Stream.map(&(inspect(&1) <> "\n"))
  |> Enum.into(SSH.stream!("tee > one_to_one_thousand.txt"))

These are the basic use cases. You can find more information about more advanced use cases at https://hexdocs.pm/librarian.

Installation

This package can be installed by adding librarian to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:librarian, "~> 0.2.0"}
  ]
end

documentation can be found here: https://hexdocs.pm/librarian/SSH.html

Testing

Almost all of Librarian's tests are integration tests. These tests are end-to-end and run against an active, default Linux SSH server. To properly run these tests, you should have the following:

The latest version of OpenSSH

A default, passwordless id_rsa.pub in your ~/.ssh directory.

[ -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ] || ssh-keygen -t rsa -N "" -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

The default key as an authorized key.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

We will be working on setting up alternative testing strategies in the future.