Show HN: Sshifu – Give SSH access in 1 command. Teleport/Smallstep alternative
github.comHey HN! Over the past few years, I’ve spent way too much time copy-pasting SSH public keys just to give people access to servers. It always felt like a chore, and the security risks (offboarding, revocation, etc.) aren’t great either.
I looked into solutions like Teleport and Smallstep, but they felt a bit too heavy and complex for what I needed.
So over the past few weeks I vibe-coded a small solution to scratch my own itch: sshifu.
The idea is simple — you set up a “sshifu server” as an auth server, configure your SSH servers to trust it, and then giving access is just telling someone to run:
"npx sshifu sshifu-server.com ssh-server.com"
That’s it. No more copying keys or touching "authorized_keys".
It’s still early and a bit rough around the edges, but it’s been working well for me so far.
Would love feedback — what’s missing for real-world usage, and what would stop you from using this? Nice, Teleport always felt like way too much for what I actually needed. The npx thing for the client side is a bit odd though — it might be cool to have a standalone binary. it does have standalone binary, you can check out the readme for other installation methods. npx is just a wrapper to make it easier to use as I assume its widely available among software engineers sorry, did't see it. Great