Installing Paramiko is pretty straightforward with Python pip. However, there is a hard dependency on the cryptography library. The library provides low-level, C-based encryption algorithms for the SSH protocol.

We will show the Paramiko installation of our Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine in the following output. The following output shows the installation steps, as well as Paramiko successfully imported into the Python interactive prompt.

If you are using Python 2, please follow the steps below. We will try to import the library in the interactive prompt to make sure the library can be used:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev
sudo pip install cryptography
sudo pip install paramiko
$ python
Python 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016, 06:48:10)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import paramiko
>>> exit()

If you are using Python 3, please refer the following command-lines for installing the dependencies. After installation, we will import the library to make sure it is correctly installed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python3-dev
sudo pip3 install cryptography
sudo pip3 install paramiko
$ python3
Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 17 2016, 17:05:23)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import paramiko
>>>