libssh2/libssh2

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1572 stars · 641 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

libssh2 is a client-side C library implementing the SSH2 protocol, licensed under the revised BSD license. It provides session establishment, authentication, encrypted channels, SFTP, SCP, and TCP port forwarding with pluggable crypto backends.

Use cases

• add ssh file transfer (sftp) to my c application
• run remote commands over ssh from a program
• implement scp file uploads in c
• create ssh tunnels and port forwarding programmatically
• authenticate to ssh servers with public keys or passwords
• embed ssh2 protocol support in a non-python tool

When to choose

• you need a lightweight, embeddable C library for SSH2 client functionality
• you need SFTP or SCP support in a native application
• you want control over sockets and blocking/non-blocking behavior
• you need a choice of crypto backends (OpenSSL, wolfSSL, mbedTLS, etc.)

When to avoid

• you need an SSH server implementation (libssh2 is client-side only)
• you prefer a higher-level SSH library like libssh with more built-in features
• you are working in a managed language where a native binding adds complexity

Facets

library · maturity stable

security cryptography networking file-system security networking developer-tools cross-platform windows cross-platform c ssh2 sftp scp client-side bsd-license port-forwarding linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="libssh2/libssh2")