PortProxy

TL;DR: Start and manage ssh tunnels just by browsing to easily-remembered URLs.

ssh -N -f -L 8888:localhost:8888 you@machine -> http://[portproxy]/machine1/8888.

PortProxy is a simple service for forwarding ports dynamically upon request from machine names found in your ssh config file. Here's how it works. Say you have a config file in your ssh that looks like this:

Host machine1
    HostName machine1.internet.com
    User you

Host machine1
    HostName machine2.internet.com
    User you

You might want port 8888 from both machine1 and machine2 (e.g. you have a Jupyter notebook running on both). So, what you would normally do is something like this:

ssh -L 8888:localhost:8888 machine1
ssh -L 8888:localhost:8889 machine2

and so on for each machine. If you have a lot of machines, the above method can get a bit cumbersome. So, PortProxy handles all of this under the hood. Your mental model of all of the ports on all remote machines becomes like this:

[PortProxy_url]/[machine_name]/[forwarded_port]

For example, to get on port 8888 on machine1, navigate to localhost:5000/machine1/8888 in your browser, if PortProxy is running on localhost:5000.

And that's it!

Installation

pip install portproxy

Usage

Just run the server, one of two ways:

❯ python -m portproxy
 * Serving Flask app "portproxy.portproxy" (lazy loading)
 * Environment: production
   WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment.
   Use a production WSGI server instead.
 * Debug mode: on
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
 * Restarting with stat
 * Debugger is active!
 * Debugger PIN: 308-152-645

or via

❯ portproxy
 * Serving Flask app "portproxy.portproxy" (lazy loading)
 * Environment: production
   WARNING: This is a development server. Do not use it in a production deployment.
   Use a production WSGI server instead.
 * Debug mode: on
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
 * Restarting with stat
 * Debugger is active!
 * Debugger PIN: 308-152-645

Then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5000/ , and happy forwarding!

Releasing

Do the following steps:

python setup.py sdist

Upload it to test PyPI:

pip install twine
twine upload --repository testpypi dist/*
pip install -U --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple -U portproxy

Make sure you can install it and it works (e.g. run the examples). Now upload to actual PyPI:

twine upload dist/*