Lawn (local spawn) is a program to allow spawning programs on your local computer from a trusted remote system, like a remote development environment. This has several applications:

• Spawning a graphical editor on your local machine to edit files remotely without the hassle and overhead of X11 forwarding

• Copying to and pasting from your local machine’s clipboard via the remote system

• Accessing credentials through a credential helper

In addition, Lawn provides functionality for mounting a portion of your local file system on the remote machine. This can be useful for preserving your shell history, work in progress, or whatever else you’d like.

This is implemented by forwarding a Unix socket from the local machine to the remote machine, which can then make requests back over the socket. In addition, Lawn can proxy its connection over the SSH agent socket for ease of use, although this can result in reduced performance.

The lawn crate is the main binary.

Getting Started

Take a look at Getting Started guide to learn how to get set up.

Security and Portability

Note that while Lawn has some access control built in, it is only designed for trusted machines. If you expose the socket on an untrusted machine, you may very well end up with a security problem. Please don’t do that.

Lawn should run on any Unix system with Rust 1.48.0 or newer. If it doesn’t work on your Unix system, let us know, and we’ll try to get it fixed.

Note that this tool is currently highly Unix specific and makes copious use of Unix sockets, Unix error codes, and the Unix-based Rust extensions. It almost certainly will not even compile on Windows, although you should be able to use it just fine on the Windows Subsystem for Linux. However, the lawn-constants and lawn-9p crates (without the unix feature) are designed to be cross-platform and available so that they can be used as a basis for other projects.

Documentation

• Getting Started Guide

• Example Configuration File

• Manual Pages

• Example Use Cases

• FAQ