How to Share Your Linux Terminal SSH Session with Your Team Members using Public Web URL

4 min readJan 27, 2025

SocketXP is a powerful tool for securely sharing your Linux terminal or SSH session with people you trust to quickly perform a joint debugging. Your customers or team members can connect to your Linux terminal session via a browser over HTTPS protocol using a public web URL.

In this article, we will discuss how to configure and setup SocketXP in your Linux machine or device so that you can share your Linux terminal with your team members, customers or anyone you trust.

Overview

Here is an overview of what we plan to do in this exercise:

Download, install and configure SocketXP in your Linux machine or device, so that you can remotely connect to it from anywhere via SSH.
Visit the SocketXP web portal and SSH into your Linux machine as a moderator of the SSH session using the SocketXP’s SSH Web Terminal.
An new SSH session will be created automatically and a random public web URL will created for this session.
Share the public web URL with anyone you trust, so that they could join the SSH session and view the Linux terminal in a browser as a passive user(view-only mode).

SocketXP — Download, Install and Configure

Follow the instructions in the below to download, install and configure SocketXP agent in your Linux machine, so that you can remotely connect to it via SSH from the SocketXP web portal:

SSH Remote Access and SSH Session Sharing Using SocketXP

Step 1: Download and Install

Follow the download and install instructions to install the SocketXP agent on your Linux server device.

Step 2: Get your Authentication Token

Use the following command to login to the SocketXP IoT Cloud Gateway using the auth token.

$ socketxp login [your-auth-token-goes-here]

Step 3: Connect the device to the SocketXP Cloud Gateway

Use the following command to connect the Linux server to the cloud gateway using a secure SSL/TLS connection.

$ socketxp connect tcp://localhost:22

Connected to SocketXP Cloud Gateway. 
Access the device securely using the SocketXP agent in IoT Slave Mode.

For the security of your device, SocketXP IoT Solution doesn’t create any public TCP endpoints that can be connected by any SSH client from the internet.

SocketXP private tunnel endpoints are not exposed to the internet and can be accessed only using the SocketXP agent (in IoT slave mode using the auth token of the user) or through the web terminal in the SocketXP web portal as shown below.

Create a New SSH Session

After you have setup the SocketXP agent in your Linux machine and connected it to the SocketXP Cloud Gateway, login to the SocketXP web portal, visit the Devices page.

Find your Linux machine or device listed in the table.

Click the console or terminal icon next to your Linux machine to SSH login to your device.

Provide your SSH login credentials.

After a successfull login, you will be shown a Linux terminal shell prompt to enter any commands.

Copy the Random Public Web URL

Now, go back to the browser tab that shows the devices table in the web portal, click the “Sessions” button above the devices table.

You’ll be taken to the “Sessions” page, where you’ll find all the live and recorded SSH sessions for all your devices.

Find the device ID and the SSH session ID associated with the SSH session you have started above.

All live SSH sessions will have a unique random public web URL created. You can copy the random public web URL by clicking the copy button listed under the column named “Public URL” for your session.

Share the public web URL with anyone you trust, so that they could use the public web URL to view the shared Linux terminal from any web browser.

Anyone who knows the random public URL can view your Linux terminal without any login credentials. It is your responsibility to ensure that you share the link with only those you trust.

It is almost impossible for anyone to guess the unique session ID assigned to your SSH session and the random token present in the public web URL generated for each session.

View the SSH Session Live

Click the random public web URL shared with you via an email or a messager app. Alternatively, copy and paste the web URL in a web browser of your choice.

Your browser will display, in real-time, the Linux terminal of the SSH session shared with you. You can only view the terminal session(in read-only mode). You cannot enter any commands in the Linux terminal shared.