Welcome to Paramiko’s documentation!

Paramiko-NG is a Python (2.7, 3.4+) implementation of the SSHv2 protocol [1], providing both client and server functionality. While it leverages a Python C extension for low level cryptography (Cryptography), Paramiko-NG itself is a pure Python interface around SSH networking concepts.

This site covers Paramiko-NG’s usage & API documentation. Paramiko-NG is still usually referred to as Paramiko in the documentation, and it is still imported as paramiko.

For information about installing Paramiko-NG: Installing

Footnotes

[1]SSH is defined in RFC 4251, RFC 4252, RFC 4253 and RFC 4254. The primary working implementation of the protocol is the OpenSSH project. Paramiko implements a large portion of the SSH feature set, but there are occasional gaps.

API documentation

The high-level client API starts with creation of an SSHClient object. For more direct control, pass a socket (or socket-like object) to a Transport, and use start_server or start_client to negotiate with the remote host as either a server or client.

As a client, you are responsible for authenticating using a password or private key, and checking the server’s host key. (Key signature and verification is done by paramiko, but you will need to provide private keys and check that the content of a public key matches what you expected to see.)

As a server, you are responsible for deciding which users, passwords, and keys to allow, and what kind of channels to allow.

Once you have finished, either side may request flow-controlled channels to the other side, which are Python objects that act like sockets, but send and receive data over the encrypted session.

For details, please see the following tables of contents (which are organized by area of interest.)

Core SSH protocol classes