Phpseclib: Securely Communicating with Remote Servers via PHP

PHP has an SSH2 library which provides access to resources (shell, remote exec, tunneling, file transfer) on a remote machine using a secure cryptographic transport. Objectively, it is a tedious and highly frustrating task for a developer to implement it due to its overwhelming configuration options and complex API with little documentation.

The phpseclib (PHP Secure Communications Library) package has a developer friendly API. It uses some optional PHP extensions if they're available and falls back on an internal PHP implementation otherwise. To use this package, you don't need any non-default PHP extensions installed.

Installation

composer require phpseclib/phpseclib

This will install the most recent stable version of the library via Composer.

Use-cases

Before diving in blindly, I'd like to list some use-cases appropriate for using this library:

1. Executing deployment scripts on a remote server
2. Downloading and uploading files via SFTP
3. Generating SSH keys dynamically in an application
4. Displaying live output for remote commands executed on a server
5. Testing an SSH or SFTP connection

Connecting to the Remote Server

Using phpseclib, you can connect to your remote server with any of the following authentication methods:

1. RSA key
2. Password Protected RSA key
3. Username and Password (Not recommended)

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by Viraj Khatavkar via SitePoint