Introduction
What Porthole is and how it keeps your terminal private.
Porthole shares your terminal, peer to peer. You run one command on your machine, hand someone a link, and your terminal streams straight to them over an encrypted WebRTC connection.
The signaling server only introduces the two peers. Once they connect, terminal data flows directly between host and viewer — it never passes through a server.
Start here
Installation
One static binary, no runtime dependencies.
Quickstart
Host your first session in under a minute.
CLI reference
Every command and flag.
How it works
The architecture behind the privacy claim.
Sharing
Control who gets in, what they can do, and what they can see.
- Read-only sessions — share as view-only
- Write access — hand over the keyboard, and take it back
- Passwords — one shared secret
- Named invites — one secret per person, and see who joined
- Credential masking — redact secrets before they leave your machine
- Session context — tell the viewer what they are looking at
- Expiring sessions — close automatically
Watching
- In a browser — nothing to install
- In a terminal —
porthole join, full fidelity forvimandhtop - From a phone — scan the QR, with an accessory key bar
Workflow
- Host controls — the Ctrl+] prefix
- Recording and replay — asciicast in, asciicast out
- Session templates — stop retyping flags
- Diagnostics —
porthole probe