A small and simple web-based SSH client. Built with Paramiko, Tornado, XtermJS and Alpine.js.

Trust & Security

Warning

Web-based SSH is a credential-harvesting nightmare by design. Proceed with caution.

wssh is designed to run on infrastructure you control. When you upload a private key it's parsed in memory and held only for the duration of the SSH session, it's never written to disk, never re-transmitted, and never logged. When the session closes, the key is released to the garbage collector.

That said, you should treat any hosted instance the same way you'd treat any SSH gateway: anyone with shell on the box can dump process memory or modify the source. Don't paste production keys into a wssh instance you don't operate yourself. For sensitive use, deploy your own copy from this repository and make sure 'debug' is set to False in ssh.py before exposing it to the network.

Read ./docs/deployment-guide.md if you want to host your own instance.

Installation

Requires Python >= 3.10. Uses the stdlib venv module and pip; no extra tooling needed.

Clone the repository and create your venv:

$ git clone https://github.com/sentrychris/ssh-client.git
$ cd ssh-client
$ python -m venv .venv

Install Python dependencies:

$ pip install .

Install NPM dependencies:

$ npm install

Build:

$ npm run build

Run:

$ python ssh.py --address=0.0.0.0 --port=4500

Mock SSH

There is a tiny mock SSH server for UI testing available at mock_sshd.py. It listens on 127.0.0.1:2222, accepts any username/password, and bridges each session to a real local /bin/bash.

Run it:

$ .venv/bin/python /tmp/mock_sshd.py

Then connect from the web UI:

• Hostname: 127.0.0.1
• Port: 2222
• Username:
• Password: