Net::SSH 0.0.5 is now available! (Yes, this comes hard on the heels of 0.0.4, but I'm going out of town for a week and a half and figured I should release the work that has been done in the last few days, since it was significant.)
Net::SSH is a pure-Ruby implementation of an SSH2 client. It may be obtained at:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/net-ssh
The complete (!) users manual and API documentation may be read at:
http://net-ssh.rubyforge.org
http://net-ssh.rubyforge.org/api
Version 0.0.5 adds the much-anticipated SSH agent support, but (alas) only on Unix-ish systems. (The PuTTY "pageant" agent is sufficiently different from the OpenSSH ssh-agent utility that it will require a pretty bit of work to interface with... any takers?)
This version also provides an "rb-keygen" command-line utility for generating keys. It mirrors a subset of the functionality of "ssh-keygen", so if you've got ssh-keygen available, you might as well use it for generating keys. If you don't, you can use rb-keygen instead.
One particularly significant bug fix was suggested by Daniel Hobe: in 0.0.4 and earlier, all of a user's private keys were loaded at startup time, which meant that if the keys were protected by passphrases, the user had to enter those passphrases for all keys up front, even if none of the keys were ever used. This was annoying. Now, key loading is delayed until the key is actually needed, so you never need to enter a passphrase for a private key unless it is actually going to be used.
Various other improvements and fixes have been added as well--see the ChangeLog for the complete list. Also, don't forget to read the users manual--all planned chapters have been drafted, and I'm just awaiting comments. (Thanks to those of you that have submitted comments on the documentation already--they've helped a ton.)
Special thanks for this release go to Daniel Hobe, without whose suggestions, comments, encouragement, and patches this release would not be nearly as slick.
(I think we may be getting close to a 0.1 release!)
···
--
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis
"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."