crschnick

I'm proud to share a development status update of XPipe, a shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local machine. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. 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.

Here is how it looks like if you haven't seen it before:

Since the last status update some months ago, a lot of things have changed thanks to the community sharing a lot of feedback and reporting issues. Overall, the project is now in a much more stable state as all the accumulated issues have been fixed. Furthermore, many feature requests have been implemented.

XPipe 8 is this biggest update yet and includes many new features and changes that are necessary going forward to allow for future features to come. The versioning scheme has also been changed to simplify version numbers. So we are going straight from 1.7 to 8.0.

New terminal launcher

The terminal launcher functionality got completely reworked with the goal to make it more flexible and improve the terminal startup performance. You will quickly notice the new implementation whenever you launch any connection in your terminal. The new implementation allows us to start up a connection while the terminal is still opening, shaving off a lot of time.

File browser improvements

The file browser has been reworked in terms of performance and reliability. File transfers of many files are now faster, and any errors that can occur are now handled better.

In terms of the interface, there is also now a progress indicator for files being transferred. For any file conflicts, there is now a new dialog to choose how to resolve any conflict when copying or moving files.

Authentication improvements

This update comes with a newly created system for handling authentication that is better suited for arbitrary authentication prompts. This allows for better support for things like 2FA and other keyboard interactive authentications schemes. The sudo elevation authentication also has been reworked to be more intuitive and mirror the behavior of the system in regard to password prompts.

You also now have finer control over the caching behaviour of passwords and the sudo behaviour via additional settings.

Settings rework

This update comes with a complete rework of the settings menu. Many options have been added and existing ones have been improved, with a focus on providing more control over security settings. Make sure to give them a read to discover new options.

There has been a big focus on providing finer-grained control over security settings, which can be especially useful in enterprise contexts.

Kubernetes configs and namespaces

This update adds support to also add connections from other kubeconfig files.

Furthermore, you can also choose to use any namespace you want. This is useful in cases where you have not set up a context for every namespace you have.

Temporary containers

You can now run a temporary docker container using a specified image that will get automatically removed once it is stopped. The container will keep running even if the image does not have any command specified that will run.

This can be useful if you quickly want to set up a certain environment by using a certain container image, e.g. a simple ubuntu image. You can then enter the container as normal in XPipe, perform your operations, and stop the container once it's no longer needed. It is then removed automatically.

Quick access for connections

One common feedback that some users shared was that it could be quite cumbersome to access a specific nested connection as one would have to possibly expand several connections first. Expanded connections would then also take up a lot of space, leading to a lot of scrolling.

There is now a quick access button available for connections that enables you to quickly choose a connection in the hierarchy without having to expand any connection views.

Other changes

• Add support for PowerShell on Linux and macOS
• Add ability to easily add custom files to the git vault
• Improve git vault performance
• Fix scaling issues on Linux by providing a separate scaling option
• Many more bug fixes

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

The system is designed to allow for unlimited usage in non-commercial environments and only requires a license for more enterprise-level environments. This system is never going to be perfect as there is not a very clear separation in what kind of systems are used in, for example, homelabs and enterprises. But I try my best to give users as many free features as possible for their personal environments.

Reworked pricing model

There was some feedback that the available plans for the professional edition were confusing. Even the FAQ could still not eliminate all points of confusion as most readers were already familiar with plans from other tools, so it was difficult to properly break up the terms.

So the pricing model has been simplified now with only the one-time payment remaining. The website and FAQ page have also been expanded and should now be easier to understand.

Outlook

So if you gave this project a try a while ago or it sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub! There are still more features to come in the near future. Next up is probably RDP/VNC support. I also appreciate any kind of feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and Slack workspace for any sort of talking.

Enjoy!

I'm proud to share a development status update of XPipe, a shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local machine. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. 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.

Here is how it looks like if you haven't seen it before:

Since the last status update some months ago, a lot of things have changed thanks to the community sharing a lot of feedback and reporting issues. Overall, the project is now in a much more stable state as all the accumulated issues have been fixed. Furthermore, many feature requests have been implemented.

XPipe 8 is this biggest update yet and includes many new features and changes that are necessary going forward to allow for future features to come. The versioning scheme has also been changed to simplify version numbers. So we are going straight from 1.7 to 8.0.

New terminal launcher

The terminal launcher functionality got completely reworked with the goal to make it more flexible and improve the terminal startup performance. You will quickly notice the new implementation whenever you launch any connection in your terminal. The new implementation allows us to start up a connection while the terminal is still opening, shaving off a lot of time.

File browser improvements

The file browser has been reworked in terms of performance and reliability. File transfers of many files are now faster, and any errors that can occur are now handled better.

In terms of the interface, there is also now a progress indicator for files being transferred. For any file conflicts, there is now a new dialog to choose how to resolve any conflict when copying or moving files.

Authentication improvements

This update comes with a newly created system for handling authentication that is better suited for arbitrary authentication prompts. This allows for better support for things like 2FA and other keyboard interactive authentications schemes. The sudo elevation authentication also has been reworked to be more intuitive and mirror the behavior of the system in regard to password prompts.

You also now have finer control over the caching behaviour of passwords and the sudo behaviour via additional settings.

Settings rework

This update comes with a complete rework of the settings menu. Many options have been added and existing ones have been improved, with a focus on providing more control over security settings. Make sure to give them a read to discover new options.

There has been a big focus on providing finer-grained control over security settings, which can be especially useful in enterprise contexts.

Kubernetes configs and namespaces

This update adds support to also add connections from other kubeconfig files.

Furthermore, you can also choose to use any namespace you want. This is useful in cases where you have not set up a context for every namespace you have.

Temporary containers

You can now run a temporary docker container using a specified image that will get automatically removed once it is stopped. The container will keep running even if the image does not have any command specified that will run.

This can be useful if you quickly want to set up a certain environment by using a certain container image, e.g. a simple ubuntu image. You can then enter the container as normal in XPipe, perform your operations, and stop the container once it's no longer needed. It is then removed automatically.

Quick access for connections

One common feedback that some users shared was that it could be quite cumbersome to access a specific nested connection as one would have to possibly expand several connections first. Expanded connections would then also take up a lot of space, leading to a lot of scrolling.

There is now a quick access button available for connections that enables you to quickly choose a connection in the hierarchy without having to expand any connection views.

Other changes

• Add support for PowerShell on Linux and macOS
• Add ability to easily add custom files to the git vault
• Improve git vault performance
• Fix scaling issues on Linux by providing a separate scaling option
• Many more bug fixes

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

The system is designed to allow for unlimited usage in non-commercial environments and only requires a license for more enterprise-level environments. This system is never going to be perfect as there is not a very clear separation in what kind of systems are used in, for example, homelabs and enterprises. But I try my best to give users as many free features as possible for their personal environments.

Outlook

So if you gave this project a try a while ago or it sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub! There are still more features to come in the near future. Next up is probably RDP/VNC support. I also appreciate any kind of feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and Slack workspace for any sort of talking.

Enjoy!

I'm proud to share a status update of XPipe, a shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local machine. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. 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.

Since the last status update some months ago, a lot of things have changed thanks to the community sharing a lot of feedback and reporting issues. Overall, the project is now in a much more stable state as all the accumulated issues have been fixed. Furthermore, many feature requests have been implemented.

Large connection sets

A lot of work went into improving the application for large use cases when you're managing hundreds of connections. This includes hierarchical organization features to group all your connections into different categories and subcategories. Furthermore, there have been multiple processing and memory optimizations to ensure that the user experience stays smooth all the time. As a side effect, the memory footprint also has gone down. For people who have to use a potato as their workstation, there's also now a performance mode setting to disable any visual effects that are not required.

You can also now tag connections by color for organizational purposes to help in situations when many connections are opened in the file browser and terminals at the same time. These colors will be shown to identify tabs everywhere within XPipe and also outside of XPipe, for example in terminal titles using unicode color symbols.

A new scripting system

XPipe 1.7 comes with a new scripting system, so now you can take your shell environment everywhere. The idea is to create modular and reusable shell scripts in XPipe that you can then use for various different use cases.

You can set certain scripts to be run on init for every connection independently of your profile files, allowing you to set up a consistent environment across all remote systems without any manual setup. In addition, you can choose to bring scripts to all your remote systems. This will make XPipe automatically copy and update these scripts to a target system if needed and put them in your PATH so that you're able to call them from anywhere.

As of now, there is one set of predefined scripts included for enabling the starship prompt in your shells, mainly as a proof of concept. What you will use the scripting system for is up to you. If you like, you can contribute scripts to be included by default.

Other news

• You can now sync your connection configurations with your own remote git repository

• You can create fully customized SSH connections by using the OpenSSH config format within XPipe

• Additional actions for containers have been added, such as attaching to a container or printing the live logs of a container in a terminal session

• A transparency slider has been added so that you can make all windows partially transparent just as you like

• Support for many more terminals and text editors across all platforms has been added

• Support for BSD systems and special login shells like pfSense and OPNsense has been added

• There's now support to open an SSH connection in your default installed SFTP client or Termius

• The .deb and .rpm releases now correctly report all required dependencies. So you can install it on embedded systems or WSL2g without any hassle

• There are now ARM releases for Linux

• Support for VMware desktop hypervisors has been added

• There have been many performance improvements to reduce the startup time, memory usage, file browser loading speed, and more

• The homepage at https://xpipe.io/ got an upgrade

• Of course, a lot of bugs have been fixed across the board

Going full-time

A few messages I received and the demand for XPipe so far convinced that there is a market for developing XPipe full-time and financing it by special commercial and enterprise plans for interested customers. It essentially encompasses support for enterprise systems and tools that you normally don't find outside of enterprises.

This will improve the development speed and quality as I can now fully focus on creating the best possible application. The scope is very small and only involves me, so no investors or other employees. This drastically lowers the break-even value compared to most other tools and allows me to implement a very lenient commercialization.

Essentially, you can use most current features without any limitation for free. Furthermore, most upcoming features will also be included in the free version. The open-source model and license also won't change. The only features that require a license are integrations for enterprise systems. For example, if you're trying to connect to a licensed RHEL system or an OpenShift cluster, it will ask you to buy a license. Conversely, with a Rocky Linux system and a k3s cluster, you can use everything for free. These commercial-exclusive implementations will probably not be included in the repository though. Other than that, there are no restrictions.

Outlook

So if you gave this project a try a while ago or it sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub! There are still more features to come in the near future. I also appreciate any kind of feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and Slack workspace for any sort of talking.

Enjoy!

I'm proud to share a status update of XPipe, a shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local machine. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. 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.

Since the last status update some months ago, a lot of things have changed thanks to the community sharing a lot of feedback and reporting issues. Overall, the project is now in a much more stable state as all the accumulated issues have been fixed. Furthermore, many feature requests have been implemented.

Large connection sets

A lot of work went into improving the application for large use cases when you're managing hundreds of connections. This includes hierarchical organization features to group all your connections into different categories and subcategories. Furthermore, there have been multiple processing and memory optimizations to ensure that the user experience stays smooth all the time. As a side effect, the memory footprint also has gone down. For people who have to use a potato as their workstation, there's also now a performance mode setting to disable any visual effects that are not required.

You can also now tag connections by color for organizational purposes to help in situations when many connections are opened in the file browser and terminals at the same time. These colors will be shown to identify tabs everywhere within XPipe and also outside of XPipe, for example in terminal titles using unicode color symbols.

A new scripting system

XPipe 1.7 comes with a new scripting system, so now you can take your shell environment everywhere. The idea is to create modular and reusable shell scripts in XPipe that you can then use for various different use cases.

You can set certain scripts to be run on init for every connection independently of your profile files, allowing you to set up a consistent environment across all remote systems without any manual setup. In addition, you can choose to bring scripts to all your remote systems. This will make XPipe automatically copy and update these scripts to a target system if needed and put them in your PATH so that you're able to call them from anywhere.

As of now, there is one set of predefined scripts included for enabling the starship prompt in your shells, mainly as a proof of concept. What you will use the scripting system for is up to you. If you like, you can contribute scripts to be included by default.

Other news

• You can now sync your connection configurations with your own remote git repository

• You can create fully customized SSH connections by using the OpenSSH config format within XPipe

• Additional actions for containers have been added, such as attaching to a container or printing the live logs of a container in a terminal session

• A transparency slider has been added so that you can make all windows partially transparent just as you like

• Support for many more terminals and text editors across all platforms has been added

• Support for BSD systems and special login shells like pfSense and OPNsense has been added

• There's now support to open an SSH connection in your default installed SFTP client or Termius

• The .deb and .rpm releases now correctly report all required dependencies. So you can install it on embedded systems or WSL2g without any hassle

• There are now ARM releases for Linux

• Support for VMware desktop hypervisors has been added

• There have been many performance improvements to reduce the startup time, memory usage, file browser loading speed, and more

• The homepage at https://xpipe.io/ got an upgrade

• There's an official xpipe nixpkg available that you can install. This one is however not always up to date and is currently missing crucial bugfixes that were released a short while ago. There is also a repository that contains the latest up-to-date nixpkg releases: https://github.com/xpipe-io/nixpkg

• Of course, a lot of bugs have been fixed across the board

• If you are interested in a video demo, there is a nice YouTube video about it

Going full-time

A few messages I received and the demand for XPipe so far convinced that there is a market for developing XPipe full-time and financing it by special commercial and enterprise plans for interested customers. It essentially encompasses support for enterprise systems and tools that you normally don't find outside of enterprises.

This will improve the development speed and quality as I can now fully focus on creating the best possible application. The scope is very small and only involves me, so no investors or other employees. This drastically lowers the break-even value compared to most other tools and allows me to implement a very lenient commercialization.

Essentially, you can use most current features without any limitation for free. Furthermore, most upcoming features will also be included in the free version. The open-source model and license also won't change. The only features that require a license are integrations for enterprise systems. For example, if you're trying to connect to a licensed RHEL system or an OpenShift cluster, it will ask you to buy a license. Conversely, with a Rocky Linux system and a k3s cluster, you can use everything for free. These commercial-exclusive implementations will probably not be included in the repository though. Other than that, there are no restrictions.

Outlook

So if you gave this project a try a while ago or it sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub! There are still more features to come in the near future. I also appreciate any kind of feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and Slack workspace for any sort of talking.

Enjoy!

Hello Linux community,

I'm proud to present to you XPipe, a new type of shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire sever infrastructure from your local machine through your installed command-line programs. 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. 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 set up required on your servers.

Since the first announcement around one month ago, a lot of things have changed thanks to the community sharing a lot of feedback and reporting issues. Overall, the project is now in a much more stable state as all the accumulated issues have been fixed. Furthermore, many feature requests have been implemented. This includes for example:

• SSH tunnel support (Local, Remote, and Dynamic)
• Automatic import from your SSH configs
• Podman support
• Support for other Linux environments on Windows such as Cygwin or MSYS2
• Fish shell environment support
• Support for more terminals and editors such as Alacritty, Kitty, and more

Here are some screenshots:

Overall, there have also been a lot of changes across the board:

• In terms of security and the handling of passwords, people did not like storing their passwords in yet another tool, so a lot of changes have been made. You can now source all required passwords either on the fly with a prompt or call the CLI of your password manager to fetch them.

• The UI also got an overhaul and is now much more responsive and performant. Many of the icons were redone to achieve a more uniform look plus it now also displays the logo of the os/distro you connected to. It is also made to be more intuitive in many aspects.

• In terms of availability, there are also now ARM builds available for Linux, plus a new xpipe AUR package. The available automatic installation scripts for bash and PowerShell have also been improved.

• Of course a lot of bugs have been fixed as well and I learned a lot about in what kind of different environments people use this tool.

So if you gave this project a try a while ago or it sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub! There are still more features to come in the near future. I also appreciate any kind of feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and Slack workspace for any sort of talking, now with a small community present.

Enjoy!

Hello selfhosted community,

I just wanted to give you a short update on XPipe, a new type of shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire sever infrastructure from your local machine through your installed command-line programs.

Since I last posted about it here around one month ago, a lot of things have changed thanks to the community sharing a lot of feedback and reporting issues. Overall, the project is now in a much more stable state as all the accumulated issues have been fixed. Furthermore, many feature requests have been implemented. This includes for example:

• SSH tunnel support (Local, Remote, and Dynamic)
• Automatic import from your SSH configs
• Podman support
• Support for other Linux environments on Windows such as Cygwin or MSYS2
• Fish support
• Support for more terminals and editors such as Alacritty, Kitty, and more

Here are some screenshots:

Overall, there have also been a lot of changes across the board:

• In terms of security and the handling of passwords, people did not like storing their passwords in yet another tool, so a lot of changes have been made. You can now source all required passwords either on the fly with a prompt or call the CLI of your password manager to fetch them.

• The UI also got an overhaul and is now much more responsive and performant. Many of the icons were redone to achieve a more uniform look plus it now also displays the logo of the os/distro you connected to. It is also made to be more intuitive in many aspects.

• In terms of availability, there are also now ARM builds available for Linux, plus a new xpipe AUR package. The available automatic installation scripts for bash and PowerShell have also been improved.

• Of course a lot of bugs have been fixed as well and I learned a lot about in what kind of different environments people use this tool.

So if you gave this project a try a while ago or it sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub! There are still more features to come in the near future. I also appreciate any kind of feedback to guide me in the right development direction. There is also a Discord and Slack workspace for any sort of talking, now with a small community present.

Enjoy!

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!