Native AppHost API for running Docker containers on Remote Machines via SSH

[WhiteOlivierus]

The Motivation

As distributed applications grow, running all dependencies locally quickly consumes a developer's machine resources. While developers have access to powerful remote dev servers, securely pushing Aspire-managed containers to these machines is currently difficult.

Furthermore, there is a strong security benefit to this approach. Running untrusted or heavy third-party container resources on a remote machine acts as an effective sandbox, isolating the developer's local workstation from potential resource exhaustion, malware, or network vulnerabilities hidden within container images.

Currently, achieving this requires global environment variables like DOCKER_HOST=ssh://... or custom SSH.Net scripts. This often breaks Aspire's seamless endpoint management, resulting in broken links on the Aspire Dashboard and proxy conflicts.

The Proposed Solution

I propose introducing a new AppHost API that models a Remote Machine as a Resource. You can then pass this remote machine resource to any container resource, instructing Aspire to spin up the container remotely via SSH, while managing the tunnels, dashboards, and logs locally.

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// 1. Define the remote machine/sandbox as a first-class resource
var remoteDevServer = builder.AddRemoteMachine("dev-server")
                             .WithSshEndpoint("192.168.1.100", 22)
                             .WithSshUser("developer")
                             .WithIdentityFile("~/.ssh/id_rsa");

// 2. Assign a container to run securely on the remote machine
var redis = builder.AddRedis("cache")
                   .RunOnHost(remoteDevServer); // Proposed extension method

// 3. Local projects reference the remote container seamlessly
builder.AddProject<Projects.MyWebApp>("webapp")
       .WithReference(redis);

By treating the remote machine as an explicitly defined resource, the Aspire AppHost can handle the heavy lifting under the hood—such as automatically establishing transparent SSH tunnels for the container's endpoints and streaming remote docker logs directly back into the local Aspire Dashboard.

[WhiteOlivierus]

So there is no animo for this?