Guides

Working with servers from a phone

Practical walkthroughs for the things that are genuinely awkward on a small screen: keeping a session alive through a commute, reviewing what an agent changed, reaching a server that is not directly exposed.

Coding agents

Running Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini CLI on a server you own, while staying in control of what they change.

Run Claude Code from an iPhone

Start, resume, and interrupt a coding agent on your own server, with the session surviving your commute.

Keep an agent running when your phone sleeps

Three separate failure modes kill agent sessions on iOS. Each needs a different fix.

Review an agent's diff on a phone

The review is what protects you. How to read a diff properly on a small screen, and what agents get wrong.

Preview a dev server without deploying

See the app your agent just built, over the SSH connection you already have. No public bind, no tunnel service.

Sessions that survive

Phones change networks and sleep. These cover keeping a terminal session alive through both.

Use Mosh on iOS

Roaming, encrypted sessions that survive switching from Wi-Fi to cellular mid-command.

Use tmux on iOS

Keep the work running on the server, independent of whether your phone is still connected.

Keys and access

Authentication, key management, and reaching servers that are not directly exposed.

SSH keys on iPhone

Generate ed25519, P-256, RSA, or Secure Enclave keys on-device and assign them per server.

Jump hosts and bastions

Reach servers with no public address by tunnelling through a bastion. Your keys never touch the intermediate host.

Import your ~/.ssh/config

Bring the hosts, ports, and ProxyJump relationships you already maintain, instead of retyping them.

Secure Enclave SSH keys

A key generated in hardware that cannot be exported, backed up, or copied, and what that costs.

Use a PuTTY .ppk key

Import a PuTTY private key directly, including Argon2-encrypted PPK v3, with no conversion step.

Files and transfer

Moving files between your device and your servers, and editing them in place.

SFTP on iPhone and iPad

Browse, transfer, and edit remote files over SSH, with no separate FTP server needed.

Remote files in the iOS Files app

Expose a server folder as a location in Files, so any app can open and save to it over SFTP.

Running servers

Reaching services that are not publicly exposed, and fixing things when you are nowhere near a desk.

SSH port forwarding

Reach a database or dashboard bound to the server's loopback. Local, remote, and dynamic SOCKS explained.

Manage Docker from a phone

Restart a container, read its logs, find the full disk, all over SSH and without exposing the Docker socket.

Monitor a Linux server

Live metrics over SSH, or an agent on your own box for 90-day history and push alerts.

Manage Nginx

Test the config before reloading, toggle enabled sites, and catch certificates before they expire.