As a DevOps Engineer, I specialize in working with Linux and Python. My experience and expertise in these areas have been the foundation of my career. In my current role, I frequently interact with servers, both cloud-based and dedicated, using SSH and Ansible. To efficiently manage a large number of servers and their information, I developed a CLI tool to assist me.

The Problem

Let’s say I have got a piece of server information in this format, which came from some project manager or customer:

IP: 192.168.0.101
User: ubuntu
Port: 22

And got a private key. What do I do normally?

I can try to get into the host via

% ssh -i Downloads/the-private-key ubuntu@192.168.0.101 -p 22

So, every time to create the communication I need to type that full line or dig through history by using some “up arrow”.

To make it easier, I create SSH configuration for servers.

In .ssh/config file, I do configure a host like below

Host secretServer1
HostName 192.168.0.101
Port 22
User ubuntu
IdentityFile Downloads/the-private-key

Thus, I can connect the server by using

% ssh secretServer1

What if I need to run some ansible-playbook on this server? Need an inventory entry again… :(

What does this tool do?

It creates a host database.
Create SSH config from that host database.
Create Ansible inventory from that same host database.

Introduction to the Tool

I named the tool “sshc”. You can install it via the Pythons “pip” command.

% pip3 install --upgrade sshc

Underlying Bits

I love working with python. To make it simple and light, at first, I preferred JSON for Ansible Inventory. But later thought to give the option to generate Yaml.

CLI tool is generated using mostly

argparse
json
pyyaml
uuid

and others. I used argparsefor a similar reason. I could choose Fire, Click, or others, but preferred plain and simple argparse.

For publishing to PyPi, I have used Poetry. It helped me easily publish the tool in PyPi for easy distribution through pip. It uses a pyproject.toml file about publishing information.

The repository of sshc is hosted in GitHub and I have set up GitHub actions to do some automated tasks like a linting check, unit test, poetry install and check command, and finally publish upon releasing a tag/version.

When I am writing this article it has a solid release: 1.0.0

$ sshc --version
sshc, v1.0.0

$ sshc --help
usage: sshc [-h] [--version]
            {init,insert,delete,read,generate} ...

SSH Config and Ansible Inventory Generator !

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version             show program's version number and exit

subcommands:
  The main command of this CLI tool.

  {init,insert,delete,read,generate}
                        The main commands have their own
                        arguments.
    init                Initiate Host DB !
    insert              Insert host information !
    delete              Delete host information !
    read                Read Database !
    generate            Generate necessary config files !

To know more I suggest you visit: https://github.com/fahadahammed/sshc

Conclusion

This tool is in the early stage. I welcome any suggestions or feedback on it. If you have any, please feel free to submit an issue in the repository or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you.

Fahad's Blog