soarinferret/sheru repository overview

⁠What is Sheru?

The goal of Sheru is simple - provide a experience similar to popular cloud shell environments (like Azure Cloud Shell) on a self-hosted server. The primary use-case is to act as a bastion container to communicate with services on your network, like SSH'ing to servers, running scripts to create VMs, etc.

Essentially, Sheru spins up a new container for every user who connects, and deletes the container when they leave. Optionally, a directory can be mounted on every container to provide access to useful files, like scripts.

⁠THIS PROJECT IS STILL IN ALPHA

What does this mean?

• There are bugs. Probably lots of them.
  • My day job is Systems / Network administration, not development. I know the code looks gross
• Security flaws are probably guarenteed.
• Feature incomplete
  • I have the most basic functionality I was looking for in my head, but more will likely come.
• This project is not geared towards less tech-savvy users - knowledge of docker will be useful when troubleshooting.

⁠Getting Started

Want to test it out? Be my guest! A sample baseline docker-compose.yml⁠ is provided in the root directory. Please note that by default it is not using SSL, and I HIGHLY recommend using HTTPS.

Besides the docker-compose file, you will also need a file called .env. At a bare-minimum, you will need something like this:

SECRET_KEY=RANDOM_KEY_GOES_HERE
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password
POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_DB=django

Here are the basic install steps:

# Clone Repo
git clone https://github.com/SoarinFerret/sheru.git
cd sheru

# Create .env file
vim .env

# Start services
docker-compose up -d

# Create first user
docker exec -it sheru_sheru_1 python manage.py createsuperuser

⁠Settings

All settings can be provided as environment variables:

• SECRET_KEY: This should be a user generated key for Django
• DB_OVERRIDE: If this option is set to anything, Django will use sqlite instead of postgres
• POSTGRES_DB: The postgres DB to connect to
• POSTGRES_USER: The postgres DB username
• POSTGRES_PASSWORD: The postgres DB password
• HEADER_AUTH: If set to 'True', the application will accept X-REMOTE-USER header from an upstream proxy server
• DEBUG: If set to 'True', the application will produce debug output

⁠Credits

• xterm.js⁠: Used for front-end terminal emulator
• This article⁠: Used as my basis for my django-channels⁠ implementation
• Font Awesome⁠: Used for icons in the project
• LogoMakr⁠: Created my free logo at LogoMakr.com