Using Fabric with an SSH public key

This post is over three years old. Some of it may no longer reflect current tooling or my current view.

Inspired by this tweet by Mike Driscoll I decided to try using Fabric to run commands over SSH from a Python script, using a public key for authentication.

This worked:

from fabric import Connection

c = Connection(
    host="my-server.simonwillison.net",
    user="root",
    connect_kwargs={
        "key_filename": "/path/to/id_rsa.pub",
    },
)
output = c.run("pwd && ls -lah")
# This outputs to the console but also lets me retrieve the result like so:
string_output = output.stdout

Mike’s Tweet recipe looks like this:

with Connection(f"{username}@{host}:{port}", connect_kwargs={"password: "pw"}) as conn:
    output = conn.run("docker images")
    print(output.stdout)

Related reading