mitten

🧤 mitten 🧤

mitten is a drop-in replacement for SSH that brings internet connection to the machines without it, and enables easy file transfer between the local and remote machines. Only you can use the connection and have the access to the local files.

Internet demo

Normally, on machines with no internet access, calls like these fail or hang:

$ ssh supercomp
supercomp> curl -I https://unkaktus.art
curl: (7) Failed to connect to unkaktus.art port 443: Network is unreachable

With mitten, they work through your local connection:

$ mitten supercomp

       ▗▟▀▀▙
      ▗▛   ▐▌
    ▗▟▘   ▗▛
▗▄▄▟▀     ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▜▄
█  █              ▝▜▖
█  █      mitten    ▙
█  █      magic!   ▗▌
▜▄▄█▄            ▗▟▀
     ▀▀▀▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀▀


supercomp> curl -I https://unkaktus.art
HTTP/1.1 308 Permanent Redirect

Mitten magic!

File transfer demo

To easily transfer files between the local machine and the remote, use mittenfs command after logging in, which provides sftp interface:

$ mitten supercomp
supercomp> mittenfs
supercomp> sftp> get local_file.dat .
supercomp> sftp> lls
local_file.dat

Mitten magic!

Binary installation

1. Download and install the binary for your platform. For example, for Linux on AMD64:

curl -L -o robin https://github.com/unkaktus/mitten/releases/latest/download/robin-linux-amd64
mkdir -p ~/bin
mv robin ~/bin/
chmod +x ~/bin/robin

Add $HOME/bin into your $PATH into your .bashrc:

export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

Installation using Go

1. Install Go (https://go.dev, brew install go, conda install go)

2. Build mitten:

go install github.com/unkaktus/mitten@latest

1. Add $HOME/go/bin to your $PATH :

export PATH="$HOME/go/bin:$PATH"

You would probably want to have it permanently, so put it into your shellrc.