Question

Could DigitalOcean use Secure Shell (Chrome Web App) for the online terminal

Their current browser command line is really slow and sometimes has issues like freezing when there are big processes going on. The Chrome web app Secure Shell really excellent, and I think it would be an amazing experience if DigitalOcean were to contact the dev to partner with them so that DigitalOcean opened this by default instead of the one they currently use.

Is this a possibility?

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Andy Hattemer
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• June 17, 2016
Accepted Answer

Secure Shell is a pretty great chrome extension, let me give some background on it that I think might explain why DigitalOcean can’t use something like that for the Web Console:

Secure Shell is only available as a Chrome Extension because it relies on something called Native Client. This is essentially a way for extensions to run pre-compiled C code with hooks and listeners that allow your C program to interface with the browser. So all the important SSH connection and encryption stuff for Secure Shell is actually happening in the Native Client part of the extension, and then just piping input and output to the browser.

Long story short, in order for DigitalOcean to switch to something like Secure Shell in the Web Console, everyone would have to:

  1. Download and use Chrome when logging in to cloud.digitalocean.com
  2. Download and activate DigitalOcean’s version of Secure Shell as a Chrome Extension

The point of the Web Console is to give everyone a quick and easy way of logging in to their droplet when they don’t have a better option.

If you find yourself using the Web Console a lot, you will probably find that switching to using an SSH client will greatly improve your experience, this tutorial is a good starting point:

GUIDE: How To Connect To Your Droplet with SSH
> This quick tutorial will show you how to connect to your new Linux cloud server for the first time, by logging into it using an SSH client. Read Guide

or if you are on windows, this tutorial will walk you through connecting to your server with the windows SSH client, putty:

GUIDE: How To Log Into Your Droplet with PuTTY (for windows users)
> This tutorial will cover how to connect to your Droplet from your local Windows computer using PuTTY. Read Guide