SSHost

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A terminal UI for managing SSH connections, built with Ratatui.

SSHost reads your ~/.ssh/config and gives you a fast, keyboard-driven interface to connect to hosts, manage keys, set up tunnels, and keep your SSH config tidy.

Features

• Connect - browse, filter, and connect to hosts from your SSH config
• Reachability testing - check which hosts are online with a TCP probe
• Host management - add, edit, and delete SSH host entries
• SSH tunnels - configure LocalForward and RemoteForward per host (2-step config flow)
• Key generation - generate ed25519, RSA, or ECDSA keys with overwrite protection
• Key upload - deploy public keys to servers via ssh-copy-id
• known_hosts - browse, import, and remove entries from ~/.ssh/known_hosts
• Connection history - tracks when you last connected to each host

Install

From source (recommended)

Requires Rust (1.85+).

git clone https://github.com/your-username/sshost.git
cd sshost
cargo install --path .

This installs the sshost binary to ~/.cargo/bin/. Make sure it's in your PATH.

Build without installing

cargo build --release
./target/release/sshost

Usage

sshost

Keyboard shortcuts

Main menu

Key	Action
Up/Down	Navigate options
Enter	Select
q	Quit

Connection list

Key	Action
Up/Down	Navigate hosts
Enter	Connect via SSH
/	Filter hosts
e	Edit host config
d	Delete host
t	Test reachability
Esc	Back
q	Quit

Form screens (configure, keygen, upload)

Key	Action
Tab/Down	Next field
Shift+Tab/Up	Previous field
Left/Right	Cycle selector fields (key type, identity file)
Enter	Submit / next step
Esc	Back

How it works

SSHost is a thin wrapper around your existing SSH tooling:

• Connections are read from and written to ~/.ssh/config
• SSH sessions are started by spawning ssh with the right flags
• Key generation uses ssh-keygen
• Key upload uses ssh-copy-id
• Tunnels are stored as LocalForward/RemoteForward in your SSH config, so they activate automatically on connect
• History is stored in ~/.config/sshost/history.json

No custom state, no daemon, no lock-in. Everything stays in standard SSH config format.

Dependencies

• Rust 1.85+ (2024 edition)
• ssh, ssh-keygen, ssh-copy-id (standard OpenSSH tools)

License

MIT