SSH with PHP

I want to create an application that will be able to connect to an SSH server via PHP. I was thinking of using TCL expect and then integrate PHP and the expect script somehow. Fortunately, before I tried that, I did some searching on google and found that there is an SSH wrapper already that can suit my need.

To install the wrapper on Ubuntu, please find the steps below:

1. Install apache and PHP first

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

2. Make sure that the server/computer have a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). Otherwise, apache2 may not be able to start.

sudo vi /etc/hosts

sudo vi /etc/hostname

3. Install the library for ssh wrapper

sudo apt-get install libssh2-1-dev libssh2-php

4. Confirm that ssh has been installed correctly

php -m | grep ssh2

You are expecting to see "ssh2"

5. Finish

Now you can start to write PHP script to connect to an SSH server