ssh2-connect

Node.js ssh2-connect

The Node.js ssh2-connect package extends the ssh2 module to provide a simplified callback-back approach to initiate a new SSH connection.

Usage

Function signature is connect(options, callback).

The main purpose of this module is to simplify the creation of an SSH connection. For example, the original ssh2 code...

ssh2 = require 'ssh2'
connection = new ssh2()
connection.on 'error', (err) ->
  connection.end()
  # not ready at all
connection.on 'ready', ->
  # ready to go
connection.connect options

...is simplified to:

connect = require 'ssh2-exec/lib/connect'
connect options, (err, ssh) ->
  # this is faster to write

Options

Options are inherited from the ssh2 Connection.prototype.connect function with a few additions:

• username
  The username used to initiate the connection, default to the current environment user.
• privateKeyPath
  Path to the file containing the private key.
• retry Attempt to reconnect multiple times, default to "1".
• wait Time to wait in milliseconds between each retry, default to "500".

Note, the "privateKeyPath" option is provided as a conveniency to prepare the "privateKey" property.

Additionally, all options may be provided in camalize (the default in ssh2) or underscore form. For example, both "privateKey" and "private_key" would be interprated the same.

Installation

This is OSS and licensed under the new BSD license.

npm install ssh2-connect

Examples

The example is using both the "ssh2-connect" and "ssh2-fs" modules.

connect = require('ssh2-connect');
fs = require('ssh2-fs');
connect({host: 'localhost'}, function(err, ssh){
  fs.mkdir(ssh, '/tmp/a_dir', (err, stdout, stderr){
    console.log(stdout);
  });
});

Compare this to the more verbose alternative using the original ssh2 module.

ssh2 = require('ssh2');
fs = require('ssh2-fs');
connection = new ssh2();
connection.on('error', function(err){
  connection.end()
});
connection.on('ready', function(){
  fs.mkdir(connection, '/tmp/a_dir', (err, stdout, stderr){
    console.log(stdout);
  });
});
connection.connect({host: 'localhost'});

Development

Tests are executed with mocha. To install it, simple run npm install, it will install mocha and its dependencies in your project "node_modules" directory.

To run the tests:

npm test

The tests run against the CoffeeScript source files.

To generate the JavaScript files:

make build

The test suite is run online with Travis against Node.js version 0.9, 0.10 and 0.11.

Contributors

• David Worms: https://github.com/wdavidw