I’m proud to share a major development status update of XPipe, a new connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. XPipe 14 is the biggest rework so far and provides an improved user experience, better team features, performance and memory improvements, and fixes to many existing bugs and limitations.

If you haven’t seen it before, XPipe works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. It integrates with your tools such as your favourite text/code editors, terminals, shells, command-line tools and more. Here is what it looks like:

Hub

Browser

Reusable identities + Team vaults

You can now create reusable identities for connections instead of having to enter authentication information for each connection separately. This will also make it easier to handle any authentication changes later on, as only one config has to be changed.

Furthermore, there is a new encryption mechanism for git vaults, allowing multiple users to have their own private identities in a shared git vault by encrypting them with the personal key of your user.

Incus support

  • There is now full support for incus
  • The newly added features for incus have also been ported to the LXD integration

Webtop

For users who also want to have access to XPipe when not on their desktop, there exists the XPipe Webtop docker image, which is a web-based desktop environment that can be run in a container and accessed from a browser.

This docker image has seen numerous improvements. It is considered stable now. There is now support for ARM systems to host the container as well. If you use Kasm Workspaces, you can now integrate the webtop into your workspace environment via the XPipe Kasm Registry.

Terminals

  • Launched terminals are now automatically focused after launch
  • Add support for the new Ghostty terminal on Linux
  • There is now support for Wave terminal on all platforms
  • The Windows Terminal integration will now create and use its own profile to prevent certain settings from breaking the terminal integration

Performance updates

  • Many improvements have been made for the RAM usage and memory efficiency, making it much less demanding on available main memory
  • Various performance improvements have also been implemented for local shells, making almost any task in XPipe faster

Services

  • There is now the option to specify a URL path for services that will be appended when opened in the browser
  • You can now specify the service type instead of always having to choose between http and https when opening it
  • There is now a new service type to run commands on a tunneled connection after it is established
  • Services now show better when they are active or inactive

File transfers

  • You can now abort an active file transfer. You can find the button for that on the bottom right of the browser status bar
  • File transfers where the target write fails due to permissions issues or missing disk space are now better cancelled

Miscellaneous

  • There are now translations for Swedish, Polish, Indonesian
  • There is now the option to censor all displayed contents, allowing for a more simple screensharing workflow for XPipe
  • The Yubikey PIV and PKCS#11 SSH auth option have been made more resilient for any PATH issues
  • XPipe will now commit a dummy private key to your git sync repository to make your git provider potentially detect any leaks of your repository contents
  • Fix password manager requests not being cached and requiring an unlock every time
  • Fix Yubikey PIV and other PKCS#11 SSH libraries not asking for pin on macOS
  • Fix some container shells not working do to some issues with /tmp
  • Fix fish shells launching as sh in the file browser terminal
  • Fix zsh terminal not launching in the current working directory in file browser
  • Fix permission denied errors for script files in some containers
  • Fix some file names that required escapes not being displayed in file browser
  • Fix special Windows files like OneDrive links not being shown in file browser

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There’s also a licensing system in place as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook

If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub or visit the Website for more information.

Enjoy!

  • crschnickOPEnglish
    3·
    13 hours ago

    So the vision is that this is only a connection hub, essentially a mediator that brings together your tools like terminals, editors, command-line clients and more. XPipe itself doesn’t have an SSH client, it just uses your locally installed one. Same goes for text editors, terminals, password managers, git clients, browsers, and more. It doesn’t replace anything, it works with your tools.

    About unifying GUI access for your homelab, I guess that is personal preference. Some people like a gui-based workflow, some do like a more terminal focused experience. But with XPipe you can get both. You can use it as a quick terminal launcher if you don’t want to use any of the other GUI functionality. For example, if you are a frequent SSH user, see my other reply: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31552343/16245994 on how it can make your life easier. You can try it out for a few minutes to see how it works for you, you can get started very quickly and there is no setup required on any servers. There’s no commitment here.

    If you like automation, there is also a built-in HTTP API (which you have to enable first). You can automate almost anything with that. The documentation for that is available here: https://github.com/xpipe-io/xpipe/blob/master/openapi.yaml and if you like python, there is also https://github.com/xpipe-io/xpipe-python-api

    For the professional use case, the same concept of a connection hub apply here. XPipe doesn’t manage your keys, you can use whatever storage format or SSH agent configuration you want. If you use a password manager in your organization, you can connect that to XPipe and have XPipe itself not store any secrets. In terms of transit security, it just forwards everything to your locally installed SSH client for example. If you care about all the security details, you can find them at https://xpipe.io/assets/documents/Security in XPipe.pdf .

    You can deploy this in your organization with whatever tools you use. Maybe the .msi with intune, or some other management tool for Linux and macOS. There are standard installers available for every use case. These can also handle updates, so if you disable automatic updates within the app and instead want to manage that yourself, you can use the installers to upgrade installations in-place with the latest releases from GitHub.

    About the data storage and usage, if you want to use shared vaults in your organization, these are all handled via your own git client and git remote repositories. You can host them wherever you want. You get a full history of who did what in that vault with git automatically.