RobotFramework SSHLibrary-compatible SCP library

14 Oct '16

Recently, I released robotframework-scpcompat, which is a SCP library for RobotFramework.

Now, there already exists a SCP library called robotframework-scplibrary, and it is perfectly usable on it’s own. In fact, if all you need is SCP, I’d encourage you to use that. However, the keywords it provides clash with the Robot SSH library. This makes using both of them at the same time very tedious. Worse, the SCP library manages connections itself and separately - but the underlying SSH Python module, paramiko, is the same for both SSH and SCP!

In contrast, scpcompat hooks into the SSH library and uses the current connection. This also means that none of it’s keywords clash. You can see SSHLibrary and my SCPLibrary working hand in hand in this example.

Note that robotframework-scpcompat and robotframework-scplibrary shouldn’t be installed at the same time, in fact they will clash. Both use the scp Python module, so functionality is on par.

Finally, why bother with SCP at all? The SSH library can do SFTP, surely that’s good enough. Turns out that SFTP can be horribly slow, although this seems to be fixed in paramiko. Still though, SCP is simpler and generally still faster.

I hope this helps. If you have any issues or requests, head to the repo and I’ll see what I can do.

Python, sysadmin, testing

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