Tim Martin's blog

I was trying to get PHP to execute commands on a remote server via SSH. Unfortunately the documentation for ssh2_exec doesn’t go into much depth about how to read the result, and the obvious code doesn’t work. If you do this:

$session = ssh2_connect('squirrel.asymptotic.co.uk');

if (!$session) {
   die("Failed to connect");
}

if (!ssh2_auth_pubkey_file($session,
                           'timm',
                           '/home/timm/.ssh/id_rsa.pub',
                           '/home/timm/temp/id_rsa')) {
   die("Failed to auth");
}

$result = ssh2_exec($session, "ls -l /home/timm");

if ($result === false) {
   die("Failed to execute command");
}

print "<pre>".stream_get_contents($result)."</pre>\n";

you get a blank result. The problem is that stream_get_contents doesn’t read the stream until EOF, it just reads whatever data is currently available. To get it to work as expected, you need to add a call to:

stream_set_blocking($result, true);

I was trying to get PHP to execute commands on a remote server via SSH. Unfortunately the documentation for ssh2_exec doesn’t go into much depth about how to read the...