I started building an alternative to SSH at https://terminalwire.com that I think is more suitable for one-off commands run on a developer workstation against a SaaS. In more concrete terms, think of the stripe, heroku, and GitHub CLIs.

It’s similar to SSH in that it streams stdio from the server to a thin-client, but that’s where the similarities end. It has additional commands, like open a browser to a URL and set “cookies” on the client terminal from the sever.

When all of those commands are put together, you get something like https://github.com/terminalwire/demodx/blob/main/app/termina... that can open the users browser to an SSO, authorize the CLI, then set a token/nonce/whatever as a “cookie” in the users terminal so they can authenticate and run commands against the SaaS.

My intention isn’t to replace SSH—it’s still the best protocol for a lot of things, but I have found it cumbersome to use it to build CLIs for SaaS, which is why I built Terminalwire.