HACKER Q&A
📣 nico

Hosting a CLI Tool via SSH?


Hi HN! I recently built a cli tool that uses AI to find job matches for software engineers (https://github.com/nicobrenner/commandjobs)

Someone on HN suggested (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=azophy_2) I should host the application via SSH, so that anyone could just do: ssh commandjobs.com

I thought that was super cool, but after doing some googling, I can't find any good resources on how to host command line applications via ssh

Would really appreciate any links or information you could provide on how to do it

Thank you

  👤 throwitaway1123 Accepted Answer ✓
If you need an open source example to use as a template you might want to take a look at soft serve: https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve
👤 d416
sshcommand is probably the simplest approach to launch your app anonymously [0]

To get more fancy with registration and a community, setup a BBS [1]. Here is how one BBS does it [2]. use the ‘local doors’ function to bridge to your app. good luck

[0] https://github.com/dokku/sshcommand

[1] https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs/connection/ssh/list/detai...

[2] https://nuskooler.github.io/enigma-bbs/servers/loginservers/...

👤 nico
It's pretty straightforward to host an application for 1 user, the session is just forced to run only the application

But then if you want to have multiple, anonymous, users accessing the application at the same time, without sharing data, it gets tricky

👤 K0IN
I'm not sure how to do it "the right way" but you may have a look at Paramiko, it's a python library that helps you implement your own SSH server (easily).

maybe you can build your own wrapper that calls a subprocess.