Tunnels

Tunnels forward network ports through an SSH connection.

Types

Local (-L): a port on this computer reaches a host and port seen from the server. Example: local 5432 → db.internal:5432, then connect your SQL client to localhost:5432.
Remote (-R): a port on the server reaches a host and port seen from this computer.
Dynamic (-D): a SOCKS5 proxy on this computer; point your browser to it to browse as the server.

Use

Start and stop tunnels from the Tunnels panel; Start with the app opens them at launch. Each tunnel shows its state, connections and transferred bytes. The status bar counts active tunnels.

Tunnels share the connection with terminals to the same host. When it drops, the tunnel shows Reconnecting and opens again after 1, 2, 4… seconds (at most 30) until the server is reachable; failures another attempt cannot fix (wrong password, port already in use) stop it.

Open Tunnels

Ports on the server

The port icon in the header of a host's pane lists the TCP ports listening on that server (read with ss, netstat or /proc, on a separate channel). Forward opens a local forward on the same port when it is free, any free port otherwise, and shows the local address: click it to open it in the browser.

When a program in the pane prints a local address such as http://localhost:5173, Shellvane offers to forward that port.

These forwards are temporary: they appear in Tunnels marked "temporary" and end when stopped. Save as tunnel turns one into a saved profile.

Unix sockets

A destination that starts with / is a Unix socket, without a port: a local tunnel to /var/run/docker.sock makes the server's Docker reachable at 127.0.0.1:<port> (DOCKER_HOST=tcp://127.0.0.1:2375 docker ps), and the same works for PostgreSQL or MySQL sockets.