How to store or save ssh client object in Django session?

Question

Below functions, I am creating the ssh client and trying to save it to django session object.

def create_ssh_client(host, user, password):
            client = SSHClient()
            client.load_system_host_keys()
            client.connect(host,
                username=user,
                password=password,
                timeout=5000,
            )
            return client

def save_to_session(request):
        ssh_client = create_ssh_client(host, user, password)
        request.session['ssh_client'] = ssh_client

** While trying to save to session, getting the type error -**

TypeError: Object of type SSHClient is not JSON serializable

Any suggestion or input appreciated.

Answer 1

use SSHClient in django

• create_ssh_client function to return a dictionary containing the necessary information about the SSH client:

import json
from paramiko import SSHClient

def create_ssh_client(host, user, password):
    client = SSHClient()
    client.load_system_host_keys()
    client.connect(
        host,
        username=user,
        password=password,
        timeout=5000,
    )
    return {
        'host': host,
        'user': user,
        'password': password,
        'client': client,
    }

• save by save_to_session

def save_to_session(request):
    ssh_data = create_ssh_client(host, user, password)
    request.session['ssh_client'] = json.dumps(ssh_data)

• to retrieve

def use_ssh_client(request):
    ssh_data = json.loads(request.session.get('ssh_client', '{}'))
    host = ssh_data.get('host')
    user = ssh_data.get('user')
    password = ssh_data.get('password')
    
    if host and user and password:
        client = SSHClient()
        client.load_system_host_keys()
        client.connect(
            host,
            username=user,
            password=password,
            timeout=5000,
        )
        # Now you can use the 'client' object for your SSH operations.
    else:
        # Handle the case when SSH client data is not available in the session.

Answer 2

The type SSHClient is not JSON-serializable. To convert it to a JSON string in your save_to_session method, you can use: json.dumps(ssh_client, default=str)

This tries to serialize the client to JSON. the parameter default=str means that if any part cannot be serialized, the method str will be used for conversion instead of raising an error.