About Gate One

Gate One is an HTML5 web-based terminal emulator and SSH client. Top features:

• No browser plugins required! Say goodbye to the security problems of Java, Flash, and ActiveX.
• Multi-user and multi-terminal: Hundreds of simultaneous users and terminals can be served from ho-hum hardware.
• Advanced terminal emulation including support for 256 colors, fancy text styles, and more.
• Supports capturing and displaying images and PDFs inline within terminals (see screenshots).
• Type in your native language! Gate One supports Unicode, international keyboard layouts, and localized strings (internationalization or i18n).
• Natural copy & paste: Highlight text and use your browser's native context menu. On Macs you can use ⌘-c and ⌘-v and on Linux desktops you can middle-click-to-paste. Shift-Insert works too!
• Terminal sessions can be resumed even if the browser is closed or disconnected. They can also be resumed from a completely different computer. You'll never have to worry about the office VPN disconnecting again!
• Supports server-side logging of user sessions via any combination of syslog, remote syslog, or directly to disk.
• Gate One can be embedded into any web application. A few lines of JavaScript is all it takes! There's an interactive tutorial covering how to embed available in the tests directory (hello_embedded).
• Many authentication mechanisms are supported: Anonymous, Kerberos (Single Sign-On with Active Directory!), PAM, Google Auth, and there's an OpenID-like WebSocket API for applications embedding Gate One (see the chat app in the tests directory for an example of how it works).
• Gate One is easy to customize: Themes and plugins can add features or override just about anything. In fact, Gate One's SSH functionality is implemented entirely via a plugin.
• Plugins can be written in any combination of Python, JavaScript, and CSS.
• The Gate One server can be stopped & started without users losing their running terminal applications (even SSH sessions stay connected!).
• The SSH plugin allows users to duplicate sessions without having to re-enter their username and password (it re-uses the existing SSH tunnel). It also supports key-based authentication and includes an SSH identity manager that supports RSA, DSA, ECDSA, and even X.509 certificates.
• The SSH plugin also provides a library of functions that other plugins can use to seamlessly execute background operations on the currently-connected terminal. You can capture this output from JavaScript and do whatever you want with it.
• The Bookmarks plugin lets you keep track of all of your hosts with support for tagging, sorting, and includes a super fast search. It was built to handle thousands of bookmarks and can be used with whatever URLs you want--it isn't limited to SSH!
• The Logging plugin includes a Log Viewer that allows users to sort, view, and even export recordings of their terminal sessions to self-contained HTML files that can be shared. Demonstrating anything on the command line can be as simple as performing the task and clicking a button!
• The Playback plugin allows users to rewind and play back their connected terminal sessions in real-time, just like a video! This can be done via the playback controls or by holding the shift key while scrolling.

• The Convenience plugin adds many convenient capabilities:

  • IPv4 and IPv6 addresses become clickable elements that can perform a reverse DNS lookup.
  • The output of 'ls -l' is transformed into clickable elements that can perform user and group lookups, convert bytes into human-readable strings, and even tell you what the 'chmod equivalent' is of the permissions field (e.g. clicking on 'crw-rw-rw-' would tell you, "(Character Device) with permissions equivalent to 'chmod 0666'").
  • Automatic syntax highlighting of syslog messages.

• The Example plugin demonstrates how to write your own plugins and shows off the SSH plugin's exec_remote_command() functionality.
• Gate One works with Python 2.6+, Python 3, and even pypy!
• The daemon that acts as the web server for Gate One is small and light enough to be included in embedded devices.

License

Gate One is dual licensed: AGPLv3 or Commercial Licensing. More information can be found at http://liftoffsoftware.com/

Screenshots

The Grid View showing multiple terminals

Displaying images inline in a terminal

A demonstration of some of the Convenience plugin's capabilities

The Example plugin showing off the real-time load graph and the 'top' widget

Documentation

The documentation for Gate One can be found here: http://liftoff.github.com/GateOne/

Also, all (this) documentation is in the "gateone/docs" directory. The HTML form is pre-built and ready-to-read.

Demo

Just press the ESC key on any page at http://liftoffsoftware.com/ to have Gate One drop down into view, Quake-style!

Other Notable Bits

Gate One's termio and terminal Python modules can be used together to automate, screen-scrape, and completely control terminal applications. The expect() function can be used as a replacement for pexpect that has some additional features and benefits:

• It can be used asynchronously: It won't block which means it is perfect for executing commands from a web application.
• It supports sophisticated decision trees and callbacks: You can completely re-define all patterns and callbacks on-the-fly based on whatever conditions you want.
• It supports Unicode output and input.
• It works with Python 3.