4.2. SSH Containers

An SSH container is just a Fabric container that is running on a remote host on your local network, where that host is accessible through the SSH protocol. This section describes some basic administration tasks for these SSH containers.

The requirements for creating an SSH container on a remote host are:

Fabric provides the fabric:container-create-ssh console command, for creating SSH containers.

Given the host, myhost (accessible from the local network) with the SSH user account, myuser, and the password, mypassword, your could create an SSH container on myhost, using the following console command:

fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser --password mypassword myremotecontainername

If the myuser user on myhost has configured public key authentication for SSH, you can skip the password option:

fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser myremotecontainername

Where the preceding command uses the key located in ~/.ssh/id_rsa for authentication. If you need to use a different key, you can specify the key location explicitly with the --private-key option:

fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser --private-key ~/.ssh/fabric_pk myremotecontainername

The last command also supports the --pass-phrase option, in case your key requires a pass phrase.

You may need to change the credentials held in ZooKeeper for a remote SSH container. To do so, use the following command:

fabric:container-update-ssh-credentials [options] container

container is the name of the container for which you want to change the credentials.

The arguments are:

--user the username of the user performing the action

--password the password of the user performing the action

Sometimes you do not have an existing fabric and you want to create one on a remote host. The starting point for any fabric is a Fabric server instance, which can act as a seed for the rest of the fabric. So, to enable you to create a new fabric on a remote host, the fabric:container-create-ssh supports the --ensemble-server option, which can be invoked to create a container which is a Fabric server. For example, the following container-create-ssh command creates a new fabric consisting of one Fabric server on the myhost host:

fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser --ensemble-server myremotecontainername

For more details about the SSH container console commands, see the "Console Reference".