ConchshellTools
Two small things that were useful enough to build while working on the client, and are more useful published than kept. Both run entirely in your browser, need no account, and are not gated behind anything.
Why they run in the browser
Both tools take input that people are right to be careful about. A configuration file names your hosts, your users and your jump boxes; a public key is meant to be public but arrives from the same directory as the private one. Neither has any business on someone else's server for the sake of a check that takes a millisecond locally.
So neither tool page makes a network request after it loads, and neither carries analytics. That second part costs us the usage statistics for these two pages, and it is worth it: the promise is checkable in ten seconds with the network tab open, rather than being something you have to take on trust.
How they are tested
The key checker is verified against ssh-keygen itself: five real key types are generated, and both the bit count and the SHA256 fingerprint are compared with what ssh-keygen -lf prints. Agreement with an outside authority is a stronger test than any assertion written by the person who wrote the parser.
The linter is checked against a rule that is easy to state and easy to fail: the config it generates must pass its own checks with no errors and no warnings.
That testing has already been worth it. It caught a truncated key being graded A — an SSH key body is a run of length-prefixed fields, so a key cut short often still parses cleanly — and it caught the linter advising you to add an IdentityFile to an empty file.
Read next
- What these clients weigh — measured install size and memory, with the method and the scripts
- Conchshell compared with twelve clients
- How the credential vault is built
- Conchshell: SSH, SFTP, FTPS and RDP in one window
- Download