Killing a job does not terminate a python script (sshj-ssh)

[William Hargrove]

Rundeck version: 4.17.6

I have an example python script that is kicked off from a job:

#!/usr/bin/python3

from datetime import datetime

import time

while True:

  now=datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

  print(now)

  time.sleep(60)

The job is defined as below:

 

The job starts on the remote node:

rundeck  28897 28896  0 05:33 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/python3 /home/whargrove/run_date.py

If I kill the job through the web console, I receive this error:

 

 

And the script still runs on the remote node. For me, that’s not what I would expect. I have been researching and there appear to be similar issues reported at https://github.com/rundeck/rundeck/issues/1038 and https://github.com/rundeck/rundeck/issues/3049 - but this seems like such a basic requirement that I feel there must be an ability to stop the process running on the machine. Neither of those issues appear to give a resolution.

Log files from server:

[2026-02-03T12:24:20,458] INFO  web.requests "POST /execution/cancelExecution" REDACTED https REDACTED form 55 ? [] (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/142.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/142.0.0.0)

[2026-02-03T12:24:20,538] ERROR workflow.EngineWorkflowExecutor - [wf:ff3bdd25-7ab1-4d3c-885d-8366fb53e915] Cancellation while running step [1]

[2026-02-03T12:24:20,563] ERROR services.ExecutionUtilService - Execution failed: 556525 in project REDACTED: [Workflow result: , Node failures: {REDACTED=[]}, status: failed]

[2026-02-03T12:24:20,628] INFO  execution.status REDACTED finish [556525:aborted] REDACTED REDACTED/REDACTED "-/kill-job-test  -"[d7245280-38b5-4e20-9585-d73b4a2cfa57]

sshj-ssh node project config file:

service.FileCopier.default.local.provider=sshj-scp

service.FileCopier.default.provider=sshj-scp

service.NodeExecutor.default.local.provider=sshj-ssh

service.NodeExecutor.default.provider=sshj-ssh

Any suggestions? I was really surprised when someone pointed this out to me and I tested it for myself.