The Terminalwire server is open source

The Terminalwire server — the gem you add to your Rails, Elixir, or other web app to build a CLI — is open source under the Apache License 2.0. Embed it, read it, fork it, ship it. No copyleft, no network clause, nothing for your legal team to worry about. You can build on it and not sweat what happens if the company behind it goes 🥷💨.

What you actually pay for isn’t the code — it’s that it all works together. Every official Terminalwire server is continuously tested against the client through a conformance harness, so every capability — stdio, prompts, files, the browser, sessions — behaves identically across versions, frameworks, and platforms. You get one maintained, guaranteed-compatible system instead of a pile of parts you have to keep in sync yourself.

Terminalwire is free for personal and non-commercial use. When you ship a commercial CLI to your customers, that’s a paid plan — see pricing.

Licensing history, for the curious: v1 started closed, then spent a while under AGPL. That’s retired. Today it’s simple — the server is Apache-2.0, and everything is verified to work together.

A tour of the server source

Terminalwire streams the command-line from your web framework to a thin client that runs on your users’ workstations. It borrows concepts from web browsers — cookies, same-domain policies — so it feels familiar if you build web apps.

The server source is on GitHub. Give it a star ⭐️ while you’re there.

• Terminalwire Server — most of the server: the protocol that emits commands to the client and the command wrapper. It runs on Rack-compatible servers across a range of Ruby setups.

• Terminalwire Rails — the Rails integration, with generators so rails g terminalwire:install MyApp scaffolds the files you’d expect in ./app/terminal/*.rb.