Document the SSH tunnel features

[andrewimeson]

Connecting to a MySQL instance via an SSH tunnel was added in #634, but there's no mention of it outside of the release notes.

It'd be nice to have examples of how to use this feature. I'd be happy to help write the docs if you can point me in the right direction, but I'll also have to figure out from reading the PR and experimenting how it works.

[meeuw]

Thanks! That's very helpful!

It's a bit experimental at this moment, you'll need to install paramiko (pip install paramiko if you've install mycli using pip) and then you should be able to use the -ssh-* arguments (see mycli --help).

The downside are that:

• at this moment two SSH connections are made when connecting using mycli (one for running queries and one for finding the completions).
• paramiko has a load of dependencies which makes mycli less portable.

[dmnlk]

@meeuw @tsroten
I tried ssh tunnel features like this.

mycli -h ssh_db_host -u user -p password --ssh-user dmnlk --ssh-host bastion_server

but, getting this error
'Channel' object has no attribute 'recv_into'

I have already installed paramiko.
and i read this comment, but paramiko/paramiko#553 is not merged yet.
#634 (comment)

environment

[]:~/ mycli -V 
Version: 1.20.0
[]:~/ python --version 
Python 3.7.4

how to solve this problem?

[meeuw]

@dmnlk could you please post the version of paramiko you've installed? (pip freeze)

[arian]

I'm getting the 'Channel' object has no attribute 'recv_into' error too on Ubuntu 18.04.

I tried

mycli -h 172.19.0.1 -u root -p abc --ssh-user ubuntu --ssh-host example.com --ssh-key-filename ~/.ssh/abc.pem

[Charl13]

Same issue:

mycli --ssh-host example.com --ssh-user root --ssh-key-filename ~/.ssh/id_rsa -h 0.0.0.0 -u root
'Channel' object has no attribute 'recv_into'

pip freeze
asn1crypto==0.24.0
aws==0.2.5
awscli==1.16.157
backports.csv==1.0.7
bcrypt==3.1.6
boto==2.49.0
botocore==1.12.147
cffi==1.12.3
cli-helpers==1.2.1
Click==7.0
colorama==0.3.9
configobj==5.0.6
cryptography==2.6.1
docutils==0.14
enum34==1.1.6
fabric==2.4.0
futures==3.2.0
invoke==1.2.0
ipaddress==1.0.22
jmespath==0.9.4
mycli==1.20.1
paramiko==2.0.2
powerline-status==2.7
prettytable==0.7.2
prompt-toolkit==2.0.10
pyasn1==0.4.5
pycparser==2.19
Pygments==2.2.0
PyMySQL==0.9.3
PyNaCl==1.3.0
python-dateutil==2.8.0
PyYAML==3.13
rsa==3.4.2
s3transfer==0.2.0
six==1.12.0
sqlparse==0.3.0
tabulate==0.8.5
terminaltables==3.1.0
urllib3==1.24.3
wcwidth==0.1.7

[nathanlisabio]

additional notes for the ssh jumpbox documentation..

on ubuntu distros dependencies:
sudo apt install python3-paramiko python3-sshtunnel

tested on ubuntu 24.04

[msva]

by the way, except the still missing documentation per se, it seems it is quite impossible to understand without it, whether it is possible to "save" ssh-tunnel_to_server "bindings" somehow.
I mean "connect to db-server A with ssh-server X, and connect to db-server B with ssh-server Z".

It looks like it can potentially be achieved through DSN-aliases somehow (maybe with variables-like syntax a-la mysql://user@db-host:3306/database?ssh_host=Z&ssh_user=moo&ssh_key=~/moo&ssh_port=33&ssh_options="A=on,B=off,..."), but it is still not clear, whether it is already suported, and just need clarification in (future?) documentation, or it is not, and so it need to be implemented yet

[rolandwalker]

Hi! I was also looking at this recently. Based on

• Document the SSH tunnel features #714 (comment)
• SSH improvements #867

it's not clear to me whether the SSH support ever graduated from "experimental" status.

There are a couple of cleanups at

• Downgrade to paramiko 3.5.1 #1445
• Graceful failure for --list-ssh-config #1444

but considering that it so far didn't work on my system, I wondered if it shouldn't be deprecated.

Is anyone depending on this functionality?