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FAQ

  • Question: Why build this?
    • Answer: I built ssh2net to learn -- to have a goal/target for writing some code. scrapli is an evolution of the lessons learned building ssh2net. About mid-way through building ssh2net I realized it may actually be kinda good at doing... stuff. So, sure there are other tools out there, but I think scrapli its pretty snazzy and fills in some of the gaps in other tools. For example scrapli is 100% compliant with strict mypy type checking, very uniformly documented/linted, contains a results object for every operation, is very very fast, is very flexible, and in general pretty awesome! Finally, while I think in general that SSH "screen scraping" is not "sexy" or even "good", it is the lowest common denominator for automation in the networking world. So I figured I could try to make the fastest, most flexible library around for SSH network automation!
  • Question: Is this better than XYZ?
    • Answer: Nope! It is different though! The main focus is just to be stupid fast. It is very much that. It should be super reliable too as the timeouts are very easy/obvious to control, and it should also be very very very easy to adapt to any other network-y type CLI by virtue of flexible prompt finding and easily modifiable on connect functions.
  • I wanna go fast!
    • Hmmm... not a question but I dig it. If you wanna go fast you gotta learn to drive with the fear... ok, enough Talladega Nights quoting for now. In theory using the ssh2 transport is the gateway to speed... being a very thin wrapper around libssh2 means that its basically all C and that means its probably about as fast as we're reasonably going to get. All that said, scrapli by default uses the system transport which is really just using your system ssh.... which is almost certainly libssh2/openssh which is also C. There is a thin layer of abstraction between scrapli and your system ssh but really its just reading/writing to a file which Python should be doing in C anyway I would think. In summary... while ssh2 is probably the fastest you can go with scrapli, the difference between ssh2 and system transports in limited testing is very small, and the benefits of using system transport (native ssh config file support!!) probably should outweigh the speed of ssh2 -- especially if you have control persist and can take advantage of that with system transport!
  • Other questions? Ask away!