sshpod

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About ​

sshpod is an early-stage Dev Container orchestrator for Podman development workspaces running locally or on an existing Linux machine over SSH. It discovers and interprets devcontainer.json, then creates and manages the corresponding Podman workspace.

It is a small, focused alternative to DevPod for developers who only need those two execution targets.

Position ​

sshpod owns the orchestration layer — resolving a provider, materializing the workspace source, reading the configuration, and driving the container through its lifecycle. Podman remains the container runtime, OpenSSH remains the transport, and Git remains the way a project reaches a remote host. None of them is reimplemented or wrapped in an agent.

The primary compatibility target is the upstream Dev Container specification. sshpod follows that specification where practical instead of defining an sshpod-specific workspace format. The long-term goal is for existing DevPod/devcontainer projects to migrate with little or no modification.

Requirements it makes of you ​

Remote hosts must already exist, be reachable through OpenSSH, and have Podman and Git installed as needed. sshpod manages the workspace and container lifecycle; it does not provision machines.

What it does not do ​

  • provision machines or manage cloud infrastructure
  • implement SSH, or duplicate ~/.ssh/config
  • replace Podman
  • manage IDEs
  • orchestrate AI agents

Kubernetes, Docker as a runtime, cloud providers, generic plugins, and the broader DevPod provider ecosystem are deliberately outside its scope.

Direction ​

The long-term use case is persistent remote compute for humans and coding agents such as Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode, so the user's laptop need not remain online. External tools such as Herdr, Moch, and tmux remain responsible for agent and session management.

Current state ​

Version 0.1.x implements a deliberately limited vertical slice: discover a devcontainer.json, create or start its container, report its status, and stop it. It does not implement the full Dev Container specification, and the roadmap is deliberately conservative about what counts as done.

Project ​

sshpod is released under the BSD 3-Clause License, and adapts its engineering conventions from cron-when.

Released under the BSD-3-Clause License