Overview
Distant is a collection of tooling and libraries to support working with remote machines. In its simplest form, there is a client and server where you run the client on your local machine and the server on a remote machine. A TCP connection is established between the client and server, and from there you are able to edit files and run programs on the remote machine.
- Reading, writing, and querying a remote filesystem
- File IO
- Directory IO
- Search
- Executing and managing processes on the remote machine
- Run programs, writing to their stdin, and reading from their stdout/stderr
- Spawn shells using a PTY
The distant cli is monolithic, meaning that all features are contained in a single binary. This means that you do not need to install a different program to run the client, server, or manager. You also do not need to worry about having different shared libraries (.so) or DLLs (.dll) available on your system to run distant.
Details
The distant binary supplies both a server and client component as well as a command to start a server and configure the local client to be able to talk to the server.
- Asynchronous in nature, powered by tokio
- Data is serialized to send across the wire via msgpack
- Encryption & authentication are handled via XChaCha20Poly1305 for an authenticated encryption scheme via RustCrypto/ChaCha20Poly1305
Additionally, the core of the distant client and server codebase can be pulled in to be used with your own Rust crates via the distant-core crate. The networking library, which is agnostic of distant protocols, can be used via the distant-net crate.