UglyPTY - A PyQt6-based SSH and Serial Terminal with Extensible Tooling.
Project description
UglyPTY
UglyPTY is an extensible graphical terminal emulator built with Python and PyQt6. It provides a user-friendly interface for managing and establishing SSH connections, with some great productivity of features. This is the base product of many Network Engineering automation tools currently in development. A plugin based system for adding features to the application is included in this release, along with some basic plugin examples. The best network automation tools are in python ...
Why?
The whole point of the UglyPTY project is not to solve every problem, but to provide a platform based on the tool network engineers use most - an SSH Terminal. Developers like text editors with add-on capabilites, this is just the equivilent for CLI focused engineers. Nothing in these plugins is supper special, I just wanted to provide enough example plugins that others could create there own tools. Both the usable .whl files, as well as original source code are included in the repo. And hopefully you enjoy using the base SSH application if thats all you need. You don't have to load any plugins to use UglyPTY, but remember, these are all beta tools, be careful ;)
Python needed a native SSH GUI Terminal
This application does NOT wrap a backend web server like Webssh. It DOES use xterm.js for terminal emulation.
Note: This is a VERY beta release with a lot of functionality.
Features
-
Session Manager: Leverage the sessions you use in your Terminal environment in your automation scripts (examples included).
- Create, edit, or delete sessions with specific settings.
- Supports password and key based authentication.
-
Credentials Manager: Safely manage your user credentials.
- Passwords are encrypted.
- Fetch all credentials or a specific credential by ID from a SQLite database (
settings.sqlite
).
-
Themed Views: Multiple theme modes - light, dark, light-dark, and dark-light.
-
Tab Management: Handle multiple SSH connections across different tabs.
-
Plugin System: Plugins are PIP wheel based add-ons to UglyPTY. They can be anything represented by a PyQt6 Widget.
Installation
-
Tested with Python 3.9.13 for Windows in venv, and Ubuntu 22.04 with Python 3.10. Other versions might work.
-
Use PyPi unless you want to contribute.
-
Use
pip
with an activated venv:pip install uglypty
To start the application, navigate to the activated virtual directory, local keys, your session database, and log files will be here:
python or pythonw -m uglypty
UglyPTY Plugins
To use a plugin, download its .whl
file and save it in a ./wheels
directory where your UglyPTY application is installed. You will have to create this folder. Here is a list of just some of the plugins:
1. Ace Code Editor: uglyplugin_ace-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
2. Dynamic Front End for Click based scripts: uglyplugin_click-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
3. Netmiko CLI Collector: uglyplugin_collector-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
4. Netbox Export to Session: uglyplugin_nbtosession-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
5. Parsing utilites for automation development: uglyplugin_parsers-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
6. Serial Console support: uglyplugin_serial-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
7. CMD, Powershell and WSL2 Tabbed terminals: uglyplugin_terminal-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
Download More Plugins
You can find more about UglyPTY's wheel based plugins from github.
You can download more .whl
plugins from wheels.
catalog.yaml
Explained
Only 2 example plugins are pre-entered in the pluging catalog. The catalog.yaml
file contains metadata for all available plugins. UglyPTY's Plugin Manager reads this file, so if you download additional plugins, you will have to edit this file to get them installed and registered with the application. Each plugin has its entry defined by the following keys:
name
: The human-readable name of the plugin.package_name
: The name used to register the plugin as a Python package. This is the name you would use if you were to install the plugin using pip.description
: A brief description of what the plugin does.import_name
: The Python import statement that would be used to load the plugin's main class or function.version
: The version number of the plugin.source_type
: The type of installation source, currently only supports "wheel".wheel_url
: The path to the.whl
file for the plugin, relative to the./wheels
directory.
Example entry:
- name: "Ugly Ace Editor"
package_name: "ugly_ace_editor"
description: "An Ace based editor with some unique features."
import_name: "uglyplugin_ace.ugly_ace.QtAceWidget"
version: "0.1.0"
source_type: "wheel"
wheel_url: "./wheels/uglyplugin_ace-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl"
Plugin Manager
When you start UglyPTY, go to Options/Plugin Manager. Here you can install and uninstall plugins:
A special thanks to those whose efforts this tool is built on (shoulders of giants and all that)
- Qt https://www.qt.io/
- PyQt6 https://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/ Yes I could have used PySide6, and maybe will add that. I've used PyQt to fix my own problems for years, and I just love it!
- Netmiko Kirk - you are awesome! (Network Engineers - his classes are awesome as well)
- Paramiko Most don't know just how much automation has been enabled by this project (Ansible, looking at you over the years)
- TTP Very few outside the network automation space know of this, but it transformed the ability to automate legacy network equipment, much of which still wont do a simple "show blah | json". I have literally worked with it since ver 0.0.1 - this guy is amazing: https://github.com/dmulyalin/ttp
Screenshots
Here are some snapshots of UglyPTY in action:
Here are some snapshots of UglyPTY-Plugins in action:
Enjoy using UglyPTY!
Package Distribution
# Create a source distribution and a wheel
python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
# Set up a new virtual environment
python -m venv test_env
# Activate the virtual environment
source test_env/bin/activate # On Linux/Mac
test_env\Scripts\activate # On Windows
# Install the wheel
pip install dist/uglypty-0.1-py3-none-any.whl
# Test your script
python or pythonw -m uglypty
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