derivepassphrase-sshagentsocketprovider¶

An interface for SSH agent socket providers, which expose an abstract communication channel for an SSH agent to derivepassphrase.

This package contains only the interface definition and the types involved.

Installation¶

derivepassphrase-sshagentsocketprovider is a pure Python package, and may be easily installed with any pip-compatible Python package manager such as pip, pipx, or uv. (pip is distributed with Python 3 by default.)

derivepassphrase-sshagentsocketprovider requires Python 3.9 or higher, as well as the typing-extensions package.

pip install derivepassphrase-sshagentsocketprovider

Registering an SSH agent socket provider¶

The SSHAgentSocket represents the abstract communication channel to an SSH agent. Ensure that the abstract channel behaves like a socket with respect to the sendall and recv operations. The abstract channel must also be a context manager, which closes itself upon leaving the context, causing further sendall and recv operations to raise an error. (By convention, this is OSError, with errno.EBADF.)

The SSHAgentSocketProvider is a callable that returns an SSHAgentSocket when called without arguments.

To then actually register an SSH agent socket provider, build an SSHAgentSocketProviderEntry struct. For example:

# The class is an SSHAgentSocket and has an empty constructor, so the
# constructor is a valid SSHAgentSocketProvider.
class SSHAgentOverStdinStdoutSocket:
    """Forwarding STDIN/STDOUT, as if connected to an SSH agent."""

    FLAGS_ARE_UNSUPPORTED = "flags argument is unsupported"
    """Common error message."""

    def __enter__(self) -> Self:
        """Return self."""
        return self

    def __exit__(self, *args: object) -> bool | None:
        """Close stdin/stdout."""
        sys.stdin.close()
        sys.stdout.close()
        return None

    def send(self, data: Buffer, flags: int = 0, /) -> None:
        """Send data to agent."""
        if flags:
            raise ValueError(self.FLAGS_ARE_UNSUPPORTED)
        sys.stdout.buffer.write(data)

    def recv(self, bufsize: int, flags: int = 0, /) -> bytes:
        """Receive data from agent."""
        if flags:
            raise ValueError(self.FLAGS_ARE_UNSUPPORTED)
        return sys.stdin.buffer.read(bufsize)


ENTRY_POINT = SSHAgentSocketProviderEntry(
    provider=SSHAgentOverStdinStdoutSocket,
    key="stdin_stdout",
    aliases=("stdin", "stdout"),
)

Then add an appropriate entry point definition in your pyproject.toml, using the entry point group name derivepassphrase.ssh_agent_socket_providers:

[project.entry."derivepassphrase.ssh_agent_socket_providers"]
first_provider = "mymodule: ENTRY_POINT"

derivepassphrase will then pick up stdin_stdout as a new SSH agent socket provider, with aliases stdin and stdout.¹

(See the tests and the test data for two further examples.)

License¶

Like derivepassphrase, derivepassphrase-sshagentsocketprovider is distributed under the terms of the zlib/libpng license.

Only the fields in the SSHAgentSocketProviderEntry matter, not what names are used to declare the entry point. By convention, however, you would choose stdin_stdout as the entry point name, not first_provider. ↩