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Boundary Desktop

Boundary Desktop is a standalone application that provides a simple interface for browsing and connecting to targets on your local computer (macOS and Windows currently supported). Launch a session in Boundary Desktop and then make a connection using your favorite tooling!

Get started

If you're running Boundary for the first time, download the latest binary and run it in dev mode locally so you can have a server to run against:

$ boundary dev

Install Boundary Desktop

  1. Download the latest .dmg installer or .exe archive from our releases page. Alternatively, if you're a homebrew user, you can run brew install hashicorp-boundary-desktop
  2. In macOS, double-click the downloaded .dmg to run the installer by draggin and dropping Boundary into the applications folder
  3. In Windows, extract downloaded archive and find .exe to launch

Run Boundary Desktop

  1. Open the Boundary Desktop application

  1. You'll be prompted for the Boundary server origin, this is the URL for the client to connect to the Boundary API. If you are running a local dev mode server, this URL will be http://localhost:9200

  1. You can now login to Boundary. We're using a dev mode server in this example with the username admin and the password password

  1. After logging in, you should see the targets your user is authorized to connect to. Since we are using a dev mode server we see the default generated target for 127.0.0.1:22

Connect!

The rest of this example assumes you're running Boundary in dev mode.

  1. Click on connect next to the default target. A pop-up window will display the local address of the proxy and the ephemeral port for the session

  1. Navigate to the Sessions pane and you'll see this session is in pending state because we haven't made a connection to it yet (but will!)

The next step assumes you have a SSH server running that the default target will connect to.

  1. On the CLI, ssh to the target using the local ephemeral port created in the previous step
$ ssh -p 49250 127.0.0.1
The authenticity of host '[127.0.0.1]:49250 ([127.0.0.1]:49250)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:glO05n2iT8Roqak5G63gMKnW8qsE0lxy0MPWcWC7iqg.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '[127.0.0.1]:49250' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
Password:
Last login: Thu Feb 11 17:49:09 2021
$
  1. Navigate back to the sessions view and you'll see this session is now active

  1. Click Cancel to cancel the session and you'll see the status go to canceling briefly, then terminated

  1. Navigate back to the CLI and you'll see your SSH session has closed
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