In this article, I show how to use the SSHHook in a PythonOperator to connect to a remote server from Airflow using SSH and execute a command.
Table of Contents
First, I have to define the SSH connection in Airflow because I will pass the connection parameters using the Airflow connection id instead of defining the host, port, username, and password in the Python code.
When that part is done, I can define the function that connects to SSH:
from airflow.contrib.hooks.ssh_hook import SSHHook
ssh = SSHHook(ssh_conn_id=AIRFLOW_CONNECTION_ID)
In the next step, I open a new connection and execute the command (in this example, I will use touch to create a new file). Creating a new connection, however, is not enough. We have to do it in the try...finally block because the SSHHook does not close it automatically when we no longer need it:
ssh_client = None
try:
ssh_client = ssh.get_conn()
ssh_client.load_system_host_keys()
ssh_client.exec_command('touch file_name')
finally:
if ssh_client:
ssh_client.close()
In the try block, I called the load_sytem_host_keys function to import the OpenSSH known_hosts file, which contains the remote hosts’ identifiers and is used as a rudiment method of man-in-the-middle attack prevention.
After that, I executed the exec_command function to create a new file. In this example, I don’t care about the server response, so I do not assign the values returned by exec_command to any variable.
If I wanted to get a response, I would have to assign the returned values to three variables:
stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh_client.exec_command('touch file_name')
SSHHook in PythonOperator
In this article, I want to show how to use the SSHHook with the PythonOperator. Therefore, I have to put the whole code in a function:
def create_the_file():
ssh = SSHHook(ssh_conn_id=AIRFLOW_CONNECTION_ID)
ssh_client = None
try:
ssh_client = ssh.get_conn()
ssh_client.load_system_host_keys()
ssh_client.exec_command('touch file_name')
finally:
if ssh_client:
ssh_client.close()
and define a PythonOperator that calls my function:
call_ssh_task = PythonOperator(
task_id='call_ssh_task',
python_callable=create_the_file,
dag=dag
)