Secure Shell (SSH)

SSH, acronym of Secure Shell, is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. It is most commonly used for remote login and command-line execution.

PHP provides the ssh2 extension to connect to SSH servers, execute commands, transfer files via SCP or SFTP, and create tunnels. For environments without the native extension, the phpseclib library offers a pure PHP alternative.

<?php

// Connect to SSH server
$connection = ssh2_connect('ssh.example.com', 22);
if (!$connection) {
    die('Could not connect to server.');
}

// Authenticate with password
if (!ssh2_auth_password($connection, 'username', 'secret')) {
    die('Authentication failed.');
}

// Execute a remote command
$stream = ssh2_exec($connection, 'ls -la /var/www');
stream_set_blocking($stream, true);
echo stream_get_contents($stream);

// Transfer a file via SCP
ssh2_scp_send($connection, '/local/path/file.txt', '/remote/path/file.txt', 0644);

// Open an SFTP subsystem
$sftp = ssh2_sftp($connection);
file_put_contents('ssh2.sftp://' . intval($sftp) . '/remote/path/file.txt', 'content');

?>

Documentation

See also PHP: SSH2 extension, phpseclib: pure PHP SSH implementation and SSH Academy: SSH Protocol.

Related : Server, Port, shell_exec(), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Task Runner

Related packages : phpseclib/phpseclib