Mirrorball – easy port forwarding for remote dev hosts

Name: Mirrorball – easy port forwarding for remote dev hosts
Availability: InStock
Author: sanil

by sanil·Jun 23, 2026·3 points·0 comments

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AI Analysis

●●SolidCozySolve My Problem

Keychain auth keeps secrets out of ps output where CLI tools expose them.

Strengths

•Auto-reconnect supervision with exponential backoff survives sleeps and network blips.
•Keychain-backed auth prevents secrets from appearing in process arguments via SSH_ASKPASS.
•Reuses existing ~/.ssh/config, keys, and agent—nothing to configure twice.

Weaknesses

•macOS-only limits audience; Windows and Linux devs need alternatives.
•SSH tunnel managers already exist (autossh, various GUI clients)—incremental improvement.

Post Description

Made a simple, free/open-source helper app to forward ports from remote hosts to localhost/etc. Just simple SSH under the hood, but a lot easier to deal with multiple ports & repeated connections (just toggle a switch in your menu bar).

I've been doing a lot more dev on remote servers (or on my home server over Tailscale from my laptop) since it's a lot easier leaving agents running for longer tasks or being able to swap to my phone. This just makes it easier to access those ports at localhost as if I'm developing locally. Super lightweight, fully native macOS app that basically is just a nicer interface for the underlying SSH commands.

Hope folks find it helpful!