purple

A terminal cockpit for your servers. Search, connect, transfer files, manage containers and run commands across hosts. All keyboard-driven. Free and open source.

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.

Install

curl -fsSL getpurple.sh | sh

brew install erickochen/purple/purple

cargo install purple-ssh

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

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

What you get

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

☁️ Cloud sync for 16 providers. AWS, Azure, GCP, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Proxmox VE, Tailscale and 9 more. VMs show up, IPs update, deleted ones disappear. Your SSH config stays the source of truth.

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

📂 Visual file transfer. Split-pane explorer, local on the left, remote on the right. Works through ProxyJump chains and tunnels.

⚡ Multi-host command execution. Save snippets, select hosts, run. Output per host in a scrollable view. {{param}} placeholders with defaults.

🔑 Automatic password retrieval. OS Keychain, 1Password, Bitwarden, pass, HashiCorp Vault or any custom command. Pulled on connect via SSH_ASKPASS. No clipboard, no typing.

🤖 MCP server for AI agents. Claude Code, Cursor and others can list your hosts, run commands and manage containers. Three lines in your config.

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. 5000+ tests. MIT license.

Links

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

Feedback

Bug or feature request? Open an issue.