Terminalwire v1 is open source

When I started building Terminalwire, I didn’t have much time to consider licensing, so I kept it closed source and thought, “I’ll open source it later when I have more time to think about it.”

That day came: Terminalwire v1, the original Ruby gem, including the source code, is available under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). You can confidently build on it and not have to worry about what happens if the company behind it goes 🥷💨. If AGPL doesn’t fit your organization, a commercial license is available.

Note: this covers Terminalwire v1. Terminalwire v2 is licensed separately — see pricing for how it works today.

A tour of the source code

Terminalwire streams the command-line from your web framework to a thin-client that runs on your users’ workstations. It borrows a lot of concepts from web browsers like cookies and same-domain policies so that it’s familiar to people who use web frameworks, like Rails.

The source code is available on GitHub. Do me a favor and give it a star ⭐️ while you’re there!

The server

The Terminalwire server is split into two parts:

• Terminalwire Server - Most of the Terminalwire server is implemented in here, including the protocol that emits commands to the thin-client and the Thor wrapper. It’s designed to work on Rack-compatible web servers across a wide variety of Ruby servers & frameworks.

• Terminalwire Rails - The Rails integration for Terminalwire provides generators so you can run commands like rails g terminalwire:install MyApp and you get the files you expect in the ./app/terminal/*.rb directory.

The client

The Terminalwire thin-client is split into a few parts too:

• Terminalwire Client - The Terminalwire client is implemented in here, including the protocol that receives commands from the server and the UI that displays them.

• Terminalwire executable - The Terminalwire executable that your users install and run.