Hello there Lemmy users, I recently posted an announcement of my project on the selfhosted subreddit and I think it is a good idea to also post it here for the Lemmy users.
About this project
I always wanted to have an easy file system and terminal access to all of my servers, including containers and clusters that you normally can’t connect to with existing solutions out of the box. So over the last months I worked on my new project XPipe to fix that.
In short, it is a brand-new type of shell connection hub with an included remote file manager that works by only interacting with already installed command-line tools on local and remote shell connections. This approach makes it much more flexible as it doesn’t have to deal with file system APIs, protocols, or libraries at all, everything is delegated to your own CLI tools. This also allows you to open connections in your favorite terminal application through XPipe. So if you normally use CLI tools like ssh, docker, kubectl, etc. to connect to your servers, you can just use XPipe on top of that without any setup required on your servers.
Here are some screenshots:
In the context of the selfhosted community, the application is technically not hosted as it is implemented as a desktop application to have access to your shells,command-line programs, and terminals, but you can use it to access all your self-hosted infrastructure. The application matches the spirit of selfhosted as you have full control over your data. Everything is stored on your system, it doesn’t need to connect to any online service and there are no accounts or anything like that. It is also designed to be cross-platform and should also run on every operating system.
So if this project sounds interesting to you, you can give it a try! There are more features to come in the near future. I also appreciate any kind of bug reports and feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and a Slack workspace for any sort of talking, although there isn’t really a community yet. Any sort of issue reports are important as I only had the ability to test it in a few different server environments and your setups can differ wildly from mine.
Enjoy!
Looks interesting! What are some of the things you use this for?
You can use it to work with any remote shell connections. I use it for my WSL instances on Windows and Docker containers on my Linux servers to connect to them in my terminal and interact with the file system through the graphical user interface as I prefer managing files that way. Support has also been expanded by request to include things like Kubernetes clusters and their containers.
Overall, XPipe makes it much less tedious to connect and access remote systems wherever they are located, especially if you have to go through multiple intermediate systems in between. Once you added a system to XPipe, you can just connect to it with your favorite terminal in one click and also browse the file system.
Overall, XPipe makes it much less tedious to connect and access remote systems wherever they are located, especially if you have to go through multiple intermediate systems in between.
Love the idea, and the support for multiple different platforms and application types gives it the potential to be a standard go-to tool. Thank you for making and sharing this!
I don’t get it. Maybe I’m dumb… but:
If I am used to work with command line tools, then what do I need this GUI for?
You get a fancy overview over all your remote connections and don’t have to type anything to establish shell connections in your terminal, you get launched into the session with one click, so it gives you an overview over your server infrastructure and saves you some typing effort.
Also you can access the file system of any connected remote system via a graphical user interface, but I guess that is personal preference whether you would like to use something like this or not.
This looks really awesome. While I manage my servers mostly through ssh, having the occasional file system mount just a click away would definitely be more convenient.
I think my environments might be a bit too large for the app to handle. I have ~90 docker containers running on one of my servers and it seems to be really struggling with it it. Generally I’ve been having some performance issues (clicking on anything has a 1-3 second delay) which appear to be amplified by the number of active containers and clients.
Memory usage increases to infinity, this is a snapshot after launching the program and having it open a shell.
https://i.imgur.com/L0y2JFN.png
It’s a really cool idea though and I like the UI and the ability to browse file systems via gui without having to map a network drive.
An update: I was able to reproduce the issue of growing memory usage when frequently adding connections like containers. As long as you don’t add more connections continuously in a session, the memory shouldn’t really grow that much. So a restart should improve the situation.
That is unfortunate to hear about these performance issues. Performance was not my main focus initially as optimizations are always supposed to come later on, but I guess that time is now. How many connections do you have added in total? I was not able to reproduce anything getting over 1GB of main memory with like 50 total connections. Also, does restarting fix some of that?
The best way of diagnosing that issue would be a heap dump of the application, but that requires some effort of getting it and also sharing it somehow, but we could do that if you want.
Sounds super interesting, thanks for sharing! I’ll definitely check it out later!
Quick question: are both docker and fs based on top of ssh or are there any more requirements? For example, do you expect the docker socket to be available over the network or do you open an ssh connection and then access the docker socket from there?
Nothing is really based on top of ssh, it is just one supported way of connecting to remote systems. The docker socket does not have to be available in the network here. You can first open an SSH connection to the host on which the docker containers and socket are located on, and from there connect to the containers.
