Remote Terminals over SSH
Add your own servers to Dices and open persistent tmux terminals over SSH that reattach when you reopen the app.
Dices can run agents and terminals directly against your own servers over SSH. Each remote terminal runs inside tmux on the server, so it keeps running after you close Dices and reattaches automatically when you reopen the app.
Why tmux-backed terminals
A normal SSH session dies when the client disconnects. Dices instead opens every remote terminal inside a tmux session on the server. The practical consequences:
- Long-running commands keep running on the server even after you quit Dices, close your laptop, or lose connectivity.
- Reattach on reopen — when you come back and open Dices, it reconnects to the existing tmux session and you pick up exactly where you left off, with scrollback intact.
This makes remote terminals well suited to infrastructure work — k8s/kubectl, argocd, Proxmox, Harbor, log tails, deploys — where you want a session that survives reconnects.
Tip: Because the session lives on the server, you can start a long deploy from your desk, close Dices, and check on it later from the same host (or, paired with the phone app, from your phone).
Add an SSH host
Hosts are configured in Settings → Remote hosts (SSH). Each host has:
| Field | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | Display name shown under “Servers” in the sidebar |
| Host | Yes | Hostname or IP address |
| Port | Yes | SSH port (commonly 22) |
| Username | Yes | The user to log in as |
| Private-key path | Optional | Path to a private key for key-based auth |
| Password / passphrase | Optional | Login password, or passphrase to unlock the key |
Secret handling
Any secrets you enter — passwords, passphrases — are encrypted on your device using the OS keychain. They are never sent to the renderer. The agent UI never sees your raw credentials; they’re used only to establish the SSH connection from the backend.
Warning: Prefer a private key over a stored password where you can. Keys are the standard for server access and avoid keeping a reusable password around at all.
Open a remote terminal step by step
- Open Settings → Remote hosts (SSH).
- Click to add a host and fill in name, host, port, username, plus a private-key path or password/passphrase as needed.
- Save. The host now appears under “Servers” in the sidebar.
- Select the host in the sidebar and open a terminal on it. Dices establishes the SSH connection and starts (or reattaches to) a tmux session on the server.
- Work as you would in any terminal. When you’re done, just close Dices — the session stays alive on the server.
Each host can hold multiple live terminals, so you can keep, for example, one terminal tailing logs and another running kubectl against the same box.