Purple

An open-source terminal SSH manager for macOS and Linux that keeps ~/.ssh/config in sync with your cloud infra.

Spin up a VM on AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, Proxmox or 11 other cloud providers and it shows up in your host list. Destroy it and the entry dims. No more hand-editing ~/.ssh/config after every Terraform run, no more grepping cloud consoles for the right IP.

A fast Rust TUI with fuzzy search across hundreds of hosts, file transfer, Docker and Podman over SSH, short-lived HashiCorp Vault SSH certificates and an MCP server for AI agents.

Keyboard-driven. Single binary. MIT licensed.

Install

curl -fsSL getpurple.sh | sh

brew install erickochen/purple/purple

cargo install purple-ssh

nix profile install github:erickochen/purple

git clone https://github.com/erickochen/purple.git
cd purple && cargo build --release

Claude Desktop users can install the .mcpb bundle for one-click MCP integration (read-only by default). Setup details on the MCP Server wiki. No data leaves your machine. See PRIVACY.md.

Run purple. Press ? on any screen for help. That's it.

Why I built this

My SSH config was fine. Proper aliases, ProxyJump chains, organized by provider. Not the problem.

The problem was everything around it. Need to check a container? ssh host docker ps. Copy a file? scp with the right flags. Run the same command on ten hosts? Write a loop or boot up Ansible for a one-liner. Spin up a VM on Hetzner? Open the console, grab the IP, edit config, save. Someone asks which box runs what? Good luck.

I wanted one place for all of that. So I built it.

What you get

🔍 Everything at a glance. Connection info, jump route, activity sparkline, tags, tunnels, snippets, containers and server metadata. Health dots show which hosts are up. Group by provider, tag or flat.

🔎 Jump to anything with one keystroke. Press : for a universal fuzzy bar across hosts, tunnels, containers, snippets and actions. Searches the SSH User, ProxyJump and Vault SSH role too, so typing your username finds every server you log in as. Field prefixes (user:, proxy:, vault:, tag:) scope to a single directive. Like Linear's Cmd+K, but in your terminal.

⚡ Instant fuzzy search. Names, IPs, tags, users. Frecency sorting puts your most-used hosts on top. Works the same with 5 hosts or 500. Scoped search within groups.

☁️ Your ssh config tracks your infra. Drop in one API token per provider. New VMs land in ~/.ssh/config the moment they boot. IPs stay current as instances move. Decommissioned hosts dim so you can purge them on your terms. 16 providers including AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and Proxmox. Run multiple accounts per provider side by side. See the wiki for the full list.

🐳 Containers over SSH. Docker and Podman. Start, stop, restart. No agent on the remote, no extra ports. Just SSH.

🚇 Live tunnel monitoring. Every SSH forward with throughput, channels, clients and uptime. Local, Remote and Dynamic SOCKS. The detail panel reveals which app owns each open channel, in real time.

And more.

🚚 Visual file transfer with split-pane explorer.

🪄 Multi-host command execution with snippets.

🗝️ Automatic password retrieval from OS Keychain, 1Password, Bitwarden, pass and the HashiCorp Vault KV secrets engine.

🎫 Short-lived SSH certificates signed via the HashiCorp Vault SSH secrets engine.

🤖 MCP server for AI agents like Claude Code and Cursor.

See the wiki for details.

How it works

purple reads ~/.ssh/config directly. No database, no daemon, no account. Comments, indentation, include files, unknown directives. All preserved.

Written in Rust. Single binary. 6800+ tests. MIT license.

Links

📖 Wiki · ☁️ Cloud Providers · 🤖 MCP Server · ❓ FAQ · 🔒 Security · 🧠 llms.txt

Credits

Screenshots and demo videos are captured in Ghostty with Berkeley Mono™ by U.S. Graphics Company.

theme = Dracula

font-family = Berkeley Mono
font-size = 15
font-feature = +ss01
font-feature = +ss05
font-feature = +calt

window-colorspace = display-p3
window-padding-x = 6
window-padding-y = 6,6

Feedback

Bug or feature request? Open an issue.