Question

decided to give Python a try for the first time, so sorry if the answer is obvious.

I’m trying to create an ssh connection using paramiko. I’m using the below code:

#!/home/bin/python2.7

import paramiko
ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())

ssh.connect("somehost.com", username="myName", pkey="/home/myName/.ssh/id_rsa.pub")
stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command("ls -l")

print stdout.readlines()
ssh.close()

Pretty standard stuff, right? Except I’m getting this error:

 ./test.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./test.py", line 10, in <module>
ssh.connect("somehost", username="myName", pkey="/home/myName/.ssh/id_rsa.pub")
File "/home/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paramiko/client.py", line 327, in connect
self._auth(username, password, pkey, key_filenames, allow_agent, look_for_keys)
File "/home/lib/python2.7/site-packages/paramiko/client.py", line 418, in _auth
self._log(DEBUG, 'Trying SSH key %s' % hexlify(pkey.get_fingerprint()))
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'get_fingerprint'

What “str” object is it referring to? I thought I merely had to pass it the path to the RSA key but it seems to be wanting some object.

Answer 1

The pkey parameter should be the actual private key, not the name of the file containing the key. Note that pkey should be a PKey object and not a string (e.g. private_key = paramiko.RSAKey.from_private_key_file (private_key_filename) ).
Instead of pkey you could use the key_filename parameter to pass the filename directly.

See the documentation for connect.