About SSHive
SSHive is built by Lucas Russo and published by NetMeSafe, a company registered in Paris. Inspired by MobaXterm, it brings the same all-in-one experience to Apple hardware: SSH, SFTP, RDP and VNC in a single app on the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad, bought once on the App Store and used on all three.
The story
As a developer and sysadmin who moved from Windows to macOS, I missed the all-in-one experience MobaXterm gave me. I was juggling Terminal, Cyberduck, Microsoft Remote Desktop and a handful of other tools. SSHive came out of that frustration: one app that combines SSH, SFTP, RDP and VNC and that belongs on the system it runs on. It started on the Mac. The app for iPhone and iPad came next, because the server that needs attention is rarely in the same room as the laptop, and Pro is a Universal Purchase: buy it once, on any of the three devices, and the other two unlock with it. Both apps are sold on the App Store and nowhere else. The Mac app speaks English, French, German and Spanish; the iPhone and iPad app speaks English, French and Spanish.
Tech stack
Two codebases, one product, and the honest answer to a question that keeps coming up: the Mac app is an Electron app. That was the trade that made it possible to ship SSH, SFTP, FTP, RDP, VNC, serial and Telnet in one window, and where it actually matters (the RDP engine, the ICMP tools, the serial console) the work is done by native code the app loads itself. The app for iPhone and iPad is not a port of it. It is written from scratch in Swift and SwiftUI, with no web view anywhere on the path of a connection.
Mac
- Electron 37, with native macOS integration: Keychain, notifications and the system appearance
- React and TypeScript, with Zustand for state
- xterm.js and its WebGL renderer, for a GPU-accelerated terminal
- ssh2, a complete implementation of SSH and SFTP in JavaScript
- A native FreeRDP 3 add-on for RDP, with NLA, CredSSP and Active Directory
- noVNC for VNC, with VNC password, RSA-AES, VeNCrypt / X.509 and Apple Screen Sharing
- Native add-ons for ICMP ping, traceroute and the serial console, each of them inside the App Store sandbox
- Zod, validating every message that crosses the boundary between processes
iPhone and iPad
- Swift and SwiftUI on iOS 17 and later: TabView on iPhone, NavigationSplitView on iPad
- Citadel for SSH and SFTP, and SwiftTerm for the terminal emulation
- FreeRDP 3, built for the device, for RDP with NLA and NTLM
- RoyalVNC for VNC
- The Keychain with SecAccessControl, behind Face ID or Touch ID
- CloudKit, for the profiles shared with the Mac
- NetworkExtension, for the IKEv2, IPSec and OpenVPN tunnels the iPhone and iPad can bring up
To see what the apps do today, start with the feature pages, which take each protocol and tool in turn; SSHive on iPhone and iPad presents the mobile app, and the changelog lists what changed from one Mac release to the next.