In this case I am trying to market XPipe as a one-man company. Yes, that is technically still a company, but it’s a little bit more personal. Because here you are not talking with the marketing department of XPipe but with the developer of it.
Yeah the pricing model requires the homelab plan for larger Proxmox cluster setups with multiple nodes. However, there are no limits to what you can do with that one Proxmox node. You can fully use every feature with it there is no limit on the amount of VMs you can manage in the community version on that node. Just when your homelab setup is larger and has multiple nodes, it requires the homelab plan. And at the end of the day, I think you can form an informed opinion on whether upgrading to the homelab plan would make sense to you after using the one node for some time. If you don’t think the saved time and effort with XPipe is worth the 5$/month for you, that’s fine. Everyone can determine that for themselves.
Wow, I missed quite a discussion up here when I was away.
I would argue this is part of this community, a showcase and status updates of projects that can be useful for the selfhosted community. I understand that there is a focus for completely free projects in here, but some tools showcased here also include a paid plan. In this case I’m trying to make a living out of this, so there is a payment model in place. I limit my posts to only major updates, so the post frequency is dependent on the development speed.
There is a free community plan available that covers many use cases, there is no need to pay for XPipe unless you want to fully commit to it and use all of its features.
This refers to having an enterprise license for Windows. If you have such a Windows product key enabled, the OS name will show as Windows Enterprise or as Windows Datacenter.
The goal is to just separate the users into personal and commercial customers, because you would have to spend quite a bit of money for these Windows licenses and keeping such systems running.
But in practice, you can just attempt to connect to any system from XPipe and it will tell you whether if you need a license for that.
It verifies whether it can actually connect to a system prior mainly because you have to do it anyways at one point and also to query system information to for example display the operating system name and logos. What exactly do you mean by on the fly here? Maybe I can improve the flow for use cases like yours, I personally have never dealt with keys in password managers.
Essentially yes. You are correct, it is not a service to host. Instead it is a desktop application that works on top of your existing CLI tools.
Thanks for the feedback!
Oh I see, that went over my head 😀
What do you refer to here? The UI or something else? I haven’t heard the word gooey being used to describe an application before, but I’m also not a native speaker.
Yeah since the last time a lot of aspects were improved, including the GUI performance which was quite bad. I hope it works out now
There are certainly some similarities, i.e. you use both to connect and work on your remote systems. However, the main difference is that XPipe does not come with integrated connection capabilities or an integrated terminal. Everything is delegated to your tools, i.e. XPipe for example connects via your installed ssh command-client and launches the terminal emulator you choose, nothing is included in the application itself.
On a more fundamental level, XPipe is not aware of any protocols like SSH, SFTP, FTP, and more. Instead, XPipe creates a new process using for example your local ssh executable, which is usually the OpenSSH client. I.e. it launches the process ssh user@host in the background and communicates with the opened remote shell through the stdout, stderr, stdin of the process. From there, it detects what kind of server and environment, e.g. shell type, os, etc. you have logged into with that shell connection, and adjusts how it talks to the remote system from there
As a result of this approach, you can do stuff with XPipe that you can’t do with other tools like MobaXterm. One example would be connecting and accessing files on a docker container as there’s no real protocol to formally connect here by default. XPipe can simply execute docker exec -i sh to open a shell into the container and handle the file management through this opened shell by sending commands like ls, touch, and more.
More broadly, XPipe can work on any shell connection, regardless of how it is established. From its perspective, there’s no visible difference between a remote ssh connection, a shell in a docker container, or your local system shell.
Furthermore, MobaXterm is Windows only while XPipe is cross-platform.
Overall, XPipe makes it much less tedious to connect and access remote systems wherever they are located, especially if you have to go through multiple intermediate systems in between. Once you added a system to XPipe, you can just connect to it with your favorite terminal in one click just as you would do manually and also browse the file system. Having a graphical overview over all available remote connections and their file systems can make your life easier, especially if you work with many different remote systems, containers, clusters, and more.
If you just regularly connect to two simple servers via SSH, then you probably won’t get that much use out of this. But if you have many servers, gateway servers, containers, and other subsystems running, then it will make your life easier.
I managed to do that, so you can now try it out at: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xpipe. Let me know whether everything works for you there, I was only able to test it on one Manjaro VM.
Yeah it could definitely show the currently running command, although it will be tricky to not spam the user with too many commands and information in short succession, but we will see.
I guess the main reason for the popularity of iTerm2 is that the normal Terminal.app is just a little bit too basic in terms of its features. It works fine but nowadays people expect a little bit more.
That is good to hear it works at least to some degree now. In theory, xpipe does detect your installed terminals at launch and will select the most appropriate (i.e. prefer iTerm2 over Terminal.app if iTerm2 is installed), however it seems like there are some false positives as is it quite difficult to properly check whether an app is installed somewhere on macOS.
The UI feedback is definitely on my TODO list, having a status bar for example that tells you exactly what is currently going on would be very nice to have instead of just a spinner or nothing at all. I will see what I can do there
That is unfortunate that you had to deal with these bugs. The challenge here is that every setup and shell environment people run this in differs and there was only so much testing I was able to do on my end. Reporting bugs is very helpful to me and they can usually get fixed pretty quickly.
If I can somehow launch a shell process into a container in podman, that should be easy to add
Alright, I will try to look into that and also try to make the interface and work flows more intuitive
I should be able to fix the download box not staying there when switching to the local environment. If you want to drag and drop files from one tab into another, you can drag the files, hover them over the tab you want to switch to, and then drop them there.
In theory you should be able to just drag the files out of the download box as normal files, so you should be able to drag them into the XPipe browser but also other applications running on your desktop. What are your system details so maybe I can try to reproduce that?
As I mentioned in reply to another comment of yours, the main difference in my opinion here is that I am posting this as an individual one-man company compared to something like Oracle. And the Oracle free tier still requires you to sign-up and provide your data. This free version does not have such a commitment.
A lot of projects are sharing status updates and development news and various platforms, some on lemmy as well. On average, I post status updates every 1-2 months when there is something to share. And yes this is self-serving, I am advertising my project after all.
I think blocking me would be a bit overkill? You could also just downvote the posts you don’t want to see and move on, you don’t have to read my posts if you don’t like them. That is up to everyone themselves. People who are interested in these posts can do the opposite.