I have a new project that I’m considering writing in Rails. I’ve never written anything in Rails but I’ve been through my share of languages over the last few decades and I’m not afraid of new things. Given this, I may have some concepts wrong and will almost certainly have some wording wrong.
I need an SSH client library that will run in a browser and which doesn’t use Java or Flash. Ideally raw HTML5. It’s essential that it support both password and key based authentication. It would be nice to have but not essential that I could also have VNC and even RDP. I’m assuming I’m looking for a Rails Gem.
Can anyone guide me down the right path?
Thanks,
Reg
Without Java or Flash, “running in a browser” is not exactly possible. There are solutions like (haven’t tried this, was a top Google result):
https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne/
but that isn’t an SSH client in a browser, it’s a browser-based interface to the SSH client on the server. Using it with key-based authentication means the private keys will need to be available to the server, which may be a deal-breaker if you’re trying to build a service for people to connect to third-party SSH hosts.
There are similar projects for RDP:
http://guac-dev.org/
But again, this is a “JS frontend to server-installed software” approach, not entirely client-side.
–Matt Jones
