supertunnel 0.1

SuperTunnel makes for easy, long-lived SSH tunneling!

st is a supercharged SSH tunnel manager, useful for managing SSH connections that you want to be long lived.

To forward port 8888 from host.example.com:

$ st forward -p 8888 host.example.com
Forwarding ports:
1) local:8888 -> remote:8888
^C to exit
[connected] 0:00:00 |

The tunnel will be kept alive, both by ssh and by supertunnel. If you lose your network connection for a while, or if you suddenly get cut off, supertunnel works with ssh to notice the connection failure, and seamlessly restarts the tunneling process.

That just scratches the surface of what supertunnel can do though.

Why supertunnel?

I wrote this script when I used to ride a train through a tunnel every day, and it would interrupt my connection to a Jupyter notebook on a remote server, but it is useful for a lot more – think about any time your SSH connection drops, and you have to go find that terminal window and start it up again. Now think about never doing that again. That’s what st provides.

st is designed to be fairly flexible (my needs have evolved over time) but still simple enough that someone who doesn’t want to understand the intricacies of SSH tunneling could use it.

It is written in Python 3, and relies on the command line tool library click, but just running pip install supertunnel should get you the st command.

Why not just use ssh?

This tool restarts your SSH connection when it goes away. But really, you could probably do this all some other way, and thats fine! Go for it! If your way is really awesome, open an issue and let me know about it.