What is a lobby boy? A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight. A lobby boy remembers what people hate. A lobby boy anticipates the client's needs before the needs are needed. A lobby boy is, above all, discreet to a fault.

--The Grand Budapest Hotel

This project is still under testing, it worked but may have bugs.

What is lobbyboy?

Well, lobbyboy is a ssh server. Yes, like sshd. But instead of spawn a new shell on the server like sshd, when you ssh to lobbyboy, lobbyboy will create a new server(VPS) from available providers(meaning to say, DigitalOcean, AWS, GCP, Vultr, etc), then redirect you to the newly created servers. Of course, if lobbyboy finds any servers available already, he will just ask if you want to enter the existing server, or still want to create a new one.

                                                       create
 +------------------+          +--------------------+  new server  +--------------------------+
 |                  |          |                    |------------->|                          |
 User(You!)         |--ssh----->    lobbyboy        |              |  DigitalOcean            |
 |                  |          |                    |------------->|  (or any other providers |
 +------------------+          +--------------------+     ssh      +--------------------------+

Key Features

• talks in SSH2 protocol, no need to install any software of configs for client-side, just ssh to lobbyboy!
• extendable provider: just implement 3 methods, then lobbyboy can work with any provider!
• destroy the server when you no longer needed.
• manage ssh keys for you

Installation

Install via pip:

Then generate config file:

lobbyboy-config-example > config.toml
# Edit your config before running!

Run server

lobbyboy-server -c config.toml

Providers

// TBD

Builtin Providers

Lobbyboy current support two Providers:

• DigitalOcean
• Vagrant (Need vagrant and virtualbox to be installed)

Different Providers support different configs, please see the example config for more detail.

Write Your Own Providers

Providers are VPS vendors, by writing new providers, lobbyboy can work with any VPS vendors.

To make a new Provider work, you need to extend base class `lobbyboy.provider.BaseProvider``, implement 3 methods:

  def new_server(self, channel):
      """
      Args:
          channel: paramiko channel

      Returns:
          created_server_id: unique id from provision
          created_server_host: server's ip or domain address
      """
      pass

  def destroy_server(self, server_id, server_ip, channel):
      """
      Args:
          channel: Note that the channel can be None.
                    If called from server_killer, channel will be None.
                    if called when user logout from server, channel is active.
      """
      pass

  def ssh_server_command(self, server_id, server_ip):
      """
      Args:
          server_id: the server ssh to, which is returned by you from ``new_server``
          server_ip: ip or domain name.
      Returns:
          list: a command in list format, for later to run exec.
      """
      pass

Then add your Provider to your config file.

Those 3 configs are obligatory, as lobbyboy has to know when should he destroy your spare servers. You can add more configs, and read them from self.provider_config from code, just remember to add docs about it :)

[provider.<your provider name>]
loadmodule = "lobbyboy.contrib.provider.vagrant::VagrantProvider"
min_life_to_live = "1h"
bill_time_unit = "1h"

FAQ

Q: Can I use lobbyboy as a proxy, like adding it to my ProxyCommand in ssh config?

A: No. Lobbyboy works like a reverse proxy, meaning to say, for ssh client, it just like a ssh server(sshd maybe), ssh client get a shell from lobbyboy, and doesn't know if it is local shell or it is a nested shell which runs another ssh. (but you know it, right? :D )