We don’t recommend using it in production regularly, but it can be helpful in a pinch, to run a database migration after a deployment or to check the contents of a file being written to disk. We primarily built SSH on Render to allow you to get a command line in containers running a service you’ve deployed. We recently announced the ability to SSH into your Render services, so I was excited to see how I could use it to improve my development workflow.

SSH has understandably become an essential tool in the software developer’s toolkit. It can tunnel pixels from a remote machine’s X11 server, sync files with rsync, and even mount a filesystem from a remote machine using SSHFS.

SSH is powerful because it can be used not only to get a command line on a remote computer but also to securely encapsulate almost any kind of data flowing between two machines. After discovering a password sniffer had been used on his university’s network, Finnish student Tatu Ylönen created the first version of the Secure Shell Protocol (or SSH) in 1995, and its use has grown continuously since. Back then, I didn’t even consider encrypting terminal traffic.

I could connect to them from my room - even if someone else was already using them!Ī more advanced version of me is now shocked at how pervasive the unencrypted Telnet protocol was in the 90s. state of Maine) only to find all the computers in the lab occupied. I could access a command line on servers all over the college campus from my tiny dorm room! I no longer had to trudge through feet of snow and frigid temperatures (I went to college in the U.S. I was pretty excited when I discovered Telnet back in the 90s.

Visual studio code ssh connection