Exosphere

Exosphere is a CLI and Text UI driven application that offers aggregated patch and security update reporting as well as basic system status across multiple Unix-like hosts over SSH.

It is targeted at small to medium sized networks, and is designed to be simple to deploy and use, requiring no central server, agents, or complex dependencies on remote hosts.

If you have SSH access to the hosts and your keypairs are loaded in an SSH Agent, you are good to go!

Simply follow the Quickstart Guide, or see the documentation to get started.

Key Features

• Rich interactive command line interface (CLI)
• Text-based User Interface (TUI), offering menus, tables and dashboards
• Consistent view of information across different platforms and package managers
• See everything in one spot, at a glance, without complex automation or enterprise solutions
• Does not require Python (or anything else) to be installed on remote systems
• Parallel operations across hosts with optional SSH pipelining
• Document-based reporting in HTML, text or markdown format
• JSON output for integration with other tools

Compatibility

Exosphere itself is written in Python and is compatible with Python 3.13 or later. It can run nearly anywhere where Python is available, including Linux, macOS, and Windows (natively).

Supported platforms for remote hosts include:

• Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives (using APT)
• Red Hat/CentOS and derivatives (using YUM/DNF)
• FreeBSD (using pkg)
• OpenBSD (using pkg_add)

Unsupported platforms with SSH connectivity checks only:

• Other Linux distributions (e.g., Arch Linux, Gentoo, NixOS, etc.)
• Other BSD systems (NetBSD)
• Other Unix-like systems (e.g., Solaris, AIX, IRIX, Mac OS)

Exosphere does not support other platforms where SSH is available. This includes network equipment with proprietary operating systems, etc.

Documentation

For installation instructions, configuration and usage examples, full documentation is available.

Development

Development Quick Start

TL;DR, use uv

uv sync --dev
uv run exosphere

Linting, formatting and testing can be done with poe tasks:

uv run poe format
uv run poe check
uv run poe test

For more details, and available tasks, run:

uv run poe --help

UI Development Quick Start

The UI is built with Textual.

A quick start for running the UI with live editing and reloading, plus debug console, is as follows:

# Ensure you have the dev dependencies
uv sync --dev
# In a separate terminal, run the console
uv run textual console
# In another terminal, run the UI
uv run textual run --dev -c exosphere ui

Congratulations! Editing any of the .tcss files in the ui/ directory will reflect changes immediately.

Documentation Editing Quick Start

To edit the documentation, you can use the following commands:

uv sync --dev
uv run poe docs-serve

This will start a local server at http://localhost:8000 where you can view the documentation. You can edit the files in the docs/source directory, and the changes will be reflected in real-time.

To check the documentation for spelling errors, you can run:

uv run poe docs-spellcheck

Linting is performed as part of the poe docs task, which also builds the documentation, but can also be invoked separately:

uv run poe docs-lint

Project Structure

The project is managed via uv and pyproject.toml, which contains all dependencies, scripts, and metadata for the application.

Exosphere uses Poe the Poet as a task runner, and all tasks are defined in the pyproject.toml file under the [tool.poe.tasks] table.

Root Directory

Source Tree

The rest of the source tree should be fairly self-explanatory.

Core Modules

Paths below are relative to src/exosphere/ unless otherwise noted.

Generally, most of the things Exosphere does to hosts (including connection management and operations) are going to be found in objects.py.

UI Modules

Paths below are relative to src/exosphere/ unless otherwise noted.

The TCSS for all of it is in a single file under ui/style.tcss.

Using Exosphere as a Library

This use case is not currently well supported, but it is possible to use Exosphere as a library. The documentation for this (alongside actual examples) is still a WIP, but you can refer to the Online API Documentation for the core functionality and objects that are considered public.

LLM/"AI" Contributions Policy

We do not endorse, recommend, or want contributions from Large Language Models (LLMs) or "AI" code generation tools. We like our bugs human made and ethically sourced.

If you want the author to bother reviewing your pull request, take the time to write it yourself. Automated PRs from Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or similar will be summarily rejected.

Similarly, anything you wish to contribute should be something you can explain and defend in code review, as the human who owns the change. If you cannot explain it, or would defer to asking an LLM, please don't bother, and save everyone the time.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

The documentation prose is licensed under CC BY 4.0, and the docs bundle a few third-party assets (fonts under the SIL OFL 1.1, a CSS file derived from the Renku Sphinx Theme under Apache-2.0). The exact per-path licensing is recorded in machine-readable form in the COPYRIGHT file, with full license texts under LICENSES/.

The bundled fonts under docs/source/_static/fonts/ are cosmetic and safe to remove for distribution in contexts where SIL OFL 1.1's awkward clauses are a problem. The documentation CSS falls back to DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Sans Mono, so the docs still build and render sensibly without them.