plug

Run a local process as if it were inside your cluster: cluster service names resolve, and cluster services are reachable — with no code change and no proxy settings in your app.

plug npm run start:dev
# your local app now reaches http://my-service:8080 like any workload in the cluster

Prefix any command with plug and it talks to the cluster by name — Node, the JVM, Python, Go, curl, gRPC, database drivers, anything. Stop the command and your machine is exactly as it was.

What you get

• Reach cluster services by their real names, from your laptop — no port-forwards to wire up, no localhost:PORT mappings, no /etc/hosts edits.
• Works with any language or tool, unchanged — your app's sockets are never touched.
• Runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
• Several clusters at once, side by side.
• Set up once per cluster, then no sudo or admin for daily use.

Install

Two pieces: a small agent in the cluster, and the plug CLI on each dev machine.

In the cluster — add the agent to the stack you want to reach:

services:
  plug:
    image: docker.io/softwarity/plug:latest
    ports: ["2222:22"]

Standalone agent, or Kubernetes: see the documentation.

On your machine — install straight from the cluster, in one line.

Linux and macOS:

ssh -p 2222 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null get@<cluster-host> install | sh

Windows, from Git Bash:

ssh -n -p 2222 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null get@<cluster-host> install-windows \
  | bash -s -- <cluster-host> 2222

The install prepares your machine once — it may ask for your password (or, on Windows, to run as Administrator) a single time — so that every later plug run needs no privilege. After that you are ready.

Use

plug npm run start:dev
plug ./mvnw spring-boot:run
plug curl http://my-service:8080/health

The first run asks which cluster to use and remembers it. Reaching another cluster is just naming it:

plug -p staging <command>     # asks once, then remembered

Everyday commands: plug ls (list clusters), plug test (check one is reachable), plug rn / plug rm (rename / remove), plug uninstall, plug about.

Several clusters at once

Run the same process against two clusters in parallel — each stays isolated:

plug -p prod    npm run start
plug -p staging npm run start

Supported today on Linux and Windows; macOS runs one cluster at a time. See the coverage matrix for what works where.

Limits

It carries TCP reached by name. UDP, QUIC and ping are not tunnelled (most clients fall back to TCP), and a hard-coded IPv6 literal is not either — a service reached by name is always fine.

Security

There is deliberately no authentication: anyone who can reach the agent's port gets network access to the cluster it is attached to. Deploy the agent only on clusters you trust, and never expose its port on an untrusted network. The full model is in the documentation.

Documentation

Everything else — how it works, deployment on Swarm and Kubernetes, profiles and versions, the security model, and the per-OS coverage matrix:

https://softwarity.github.io/plug/

Build from source with go build -o plug ./cli. Distribution is from the cluster only — the agent image is the single source of the CLI, so there is no separate package to install or keep in sync.