Almost every engineer knows SSH. And almost every team I’ve worked with manages access by copying public keys into servers, forgetting to remove them later, and sometimes sharing access in ways that are… not ideal.

It works fine until you have dozens of servers, multiple engineers, short-term access needs, or any real security requirement. At that point, things start to get messy and a bit hard to trust.

I looked into tools like Teleport and Smallstep, but they felt too heavy for what I needed in terms of infrastructure, setup, and learning curve. So I built Sshifu.

The idea is simple: you run a small server that handles authentication (for example via a GitHub org), it issues short-lived SSH certificates, and users just run a CLI to get access automatically. No more manually managing `authorized_keys` across machines.

Quick disclaimer: this is very much a “vibe-coded” project (probably 99%). I built it to scratch my own itch, so it’s still early and a bit rough around the edges. That said, it works well for my use case so far.

Would love feedback, especially what’s missing for real-world usage, and what would stop you from using this.