Password-protected sessions
Require a password before anyone can join your session.
A session link is a capability — anyone who has it can connect. When a link might be seen by people you do not want in, gate the session with a password.
PORTHOLE_PASSWORD="correct horse" porthole hostWhen a viewer opens the link, they are prompted for the password before the connection is established. A wrong password never reaches your terminal, and repeated attempts are slowed by per-token exponential backoff on the server.
Keep it out of ps and shell history
The environment form above is the one to use. There is also a flag:
porthole host --password "correct horse" # visible to other local users...but a command line is world-readable in ps on most systems and lands in
your shell history. PORTHOLE_PASSWORD avoids both. The flag exists for
scripts where you are already handling the value carefully.
A flag always wins over the environment variable, which always wins over the
default. So --password on the command line overrides PORTHOLE_PASSWORD.
Password or invites?
A password is one shared secret for everyone. That is the right shape when you are letting a known group in and do not care which of them shows up.
Named invites issue one secret per person instead:
porthole host --allow Ali --allow SanaUse invites when you want to know who joined, or to admit one person without handing the same secret to a group. Neither verifies identity — a secret of either kind can be forwarded.
Combine with read-only
Password and read-only stack — a gated, view-only session:
PORTHOLE_PASSWORD="correct horse" porthole host --readonly