Add an SSH Console to you Swift Server
I have a number of servers written in Swift. Mostly these are HTTP backends. As anyone who has written backends knows, you always want to query some information out of them or maybe change a setting. Then ensues a carving off if the URL space, writing a bunch of command handlers, fretting over how to keep users out of them, and a creeping need to fuss with the HTML.
Earlier this week I got nerd sniped by the Swift NIO group when they released SwiftNIO SSH and problem solved!
I built SSHConsole to trivially add an SSH listening port to your existing server and let you build your management commands as plain text generating commands.
Thoughts on NIOSSH
- There was a fair bit of frustration getting public key authentication working, but mostly because it was too easy. Some more documentation would help here, but you can just look at my example Echo program and the library and see how it all works.
- The private key datatype is overly opaque. It makes you rewrite part of it so you can serialize and retrieve your SSH host key.
Thoughts on the Rest of the Project
- I actually ended up wasted a lot more time struggling with Swift Argument Parser since I was outside its normal use case. There's another post on that.
- As usual, dressing up for GitHub and adding the inline documentation took about as long as the design and coding. And I left out the high level documents because I was tired at the end. You'll have to live with the examples.