Sshboard MCP server

sshboard

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Your AI agent and you, looking at the same server, on the same screen, over one SSH connection.

You keep your own SFTP client and your own terminal. The agent works beside you — inside a fence you drew — and every single thing it does scrolls past in your window while it happens.

⚠️ This is alpha. It started being used on a production server on 2026-09-09

(investigating a failed certificate renewal). 747 tests pass (418 Rust, 329

frontend) and installers are bundled for Windows (x64 / ARM64) and macOS.

None of that means it works as a tool — we shipped a build whose terminal

displayed not one byte for three days (Issue #10).

⬇ Download · Direction · Every decision, with its reasoning

When you would reach for this

"Renew the certificates on three hosts, today"

You have a terminal open per host and you are copying the same command into each, watching for the one that fails. sshboard opens one console per connection — or two on the same host, side by side — and the agent can read all of them while you work. Not "the agent runs it for you": the agent watches what you are doing and tells you which pane went wrong.

(This shot predates the split view — it shows one console with the open connections as tabs. Two panes side by side landed in 0.1.21.)

"Mail stopped arriving and I don't know where to look"

You ask the agent. It reads /etc/postfix/main.cf, checks the service, tails the log — over the same SSH session you are already on, and you see each step as it happens. It cannot run an arbitrary command to do it: there is no runcommand(cmd) tool.**

[Human] $ cd /var/www
[AI]    $ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        50G   38G   10G  80% /
[AI]    read /etc/postfix/main.cf  (4.1 KB)

"I want help, but not an agent loose on my server"

The agent may write only inside directories you listed, one connection at a time. The list starts empty, so it cannot write a single byte until you say where. Delete, rename, move, chmod, restart, package installs, sudo — none of them exist for the agent. You are not restricted anywhere.

Try it in five minutes

Install the app, then point your agent at it. There is nothing else to run — the MCP server lives inside the app.

# 1. a throwaway SSH server on your own machine (needs Docker)
sh tools/test-server/up.sh
ssh-add tools/test-server/.key

# 2. the app
pnpm install
pnpm --filter desktop tauri dev

Register 127.0.0.1:2222, user probe, connect, then press Copy the MCP command in the window's title bar and paste it into your agent:

claude mcp add --transport http sshboard http://127.0.0.1:22022 \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer <the token the button copied>"

Prebuilt installers are on the releases page (Windows x64 / ARM64, macOS Apple Silicon). They are not code-signed, so SmartScreen and Gatekeeper will both stop you the first time.

What you see while the agent works

Every operation, yours and the agent's, lands in one band. You do not have to ask what it did.

![The activity band: one line per operation, with [AI] marking the agent's](site/shots/en/band.png)

When something fails, the same log the agent reads over MCP is on your screen — which stage it reached, why it stopped, and what to do next. It carries no hostnames, no usernames and no secrets.

Why this exists

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.