How to use SSH to run a local shell script on a remote machine?

Question

I have to run a local shell script (windows/Linux) on a remote machine.

I have SSH configured on both machine A and B. My script is on machine A which will run some o

Answer 1

This is an extension to YarekT's answer to combine inline remote commands with passing ENV variables from the local machine to the remote host so you can parameterize your scripts on the remote side:

ssh user@host ARG1=$ARG1 ARG2=$ARG2 'bash -s' <<'ENDSSH'
  # commands to run on remote host
  echo $ARG1 $ARG2
ENDSSH

I found this exceptionally helpful by keeping it all in one script so it's very readable and maintainable.

Why this works. ssh supports the following syntax:

ssh user@host remote_command

In bash we can specify environment variables to define prior to running a command on a single line like so:

ENV_VAR_1='value1' ENV_VAR_2='value2' bash -c 'echo $ENV_VAR_1 $ENV_VAR_2'

That makes it easy to define variables prior to running a command. In this case echo is our command we're running. Everything before echo defines environment variables.

So we combine those two features and YarekT's answer to get:

ssh user@host ARG1=$ARG1 ARG2=$ARG2 'bash -s' <<'ENDSSH'...

In this case we are setting ARG1 and ARG2 to local values. Sending everything after user@host as the remote_command. When the remote machine executes the command ARG1 and ARG2 are set the local values, thanks to local command line evaluation, which defines environment variables on the remote server, then executes the bash -s command using those variables. Voila.