Why Shazbot
Managing SSH tunnels by hand means juggling terminal windows and long ssh -L commands. Shazbot keeps your servers and forwards organized in one tidy popover, and keeps the connections alive in the background.
It's a true native Mac app — a lightweight menu bar utility with no Dock icon, built entirely in Swift and SwiftUI. SSH is handled by a pure-Swift stack, so Shazbot never shells out to the ssh binary or spawns subprocesses.
Features
Menu bar native
Lives in the menu bar, not the Dock. A two-panel popover: servers on the left, tunnels on the right. Click to open, click elsewhere to dismiss.
Pure-Swift SSH
Connections run on a native Swift SSH stack — no subprocesses, no bundled OpenSSH binary, no shell escaping surprises. Full App Sandbox and Hardened Runtime throughout.
Flexible authentication
Password or key files — ed25519, RSA, and ECDSA. Passphrase-protected keys are supported for all three formats.
Auto-reconnect
Optional per-server retries keep tunnels alive across flaky networks and dropped connections — without you needing to babysit them.
Diagnostic logs
When a tunnel fails, a detailed connection log captures exactly what went wrong — copy or save it with one click to include in a support request.
Launch at login
Configure Shazbot to launch automatically at login so your tunnels are ready the moment you sit down. Toggleable from the menu bar icon.
Zero telemetry. Full stop.
Shazbot collects no personal data, has no analytics, and makes no network requests except the SSH connections you explicitly create. Your server hostnames, usernames, and credentials never leave your Mac. Read the privacy policy →