LightkeeperRM (Remote Management) is a customizable server management tool for maintaining servers over SSH. Lightkeeper provides efficient view over server's resources and reduces repetitive typing. It simplifies general maintenance tasks such as upgrades, monitoring, debugging and configuration.

Agentless monitoring of hosts and certificates.
No additional daemons, agents or other software is needed on target hosts. LightkeeperRM will only run standard Linux commands already available on the host. You can see executed commands through debug log and on target hosts's logs (depending on setup), so it's easy to audit and debug.

Extensive keyboard shortcuts.
Lightkeeper uses hotkeys extensively and gets out of the way in case you need to use terminal.
Just press Ctrl-T to open a terminal in a new tab.

LightkeeperRM is customizable, modular and easily extendable, so that it can be modified for different needs.

NOTE: Lightkeeper is currently in beta and is missing some features. Documentation is also not yet complete.

Overview of LightkeeperRM's GUI

File browser

Charts

Integrated log viewer

Integrated terminal

Certificate monitoring tool

• Some features
• Some background
• Installing
  • Flatpak
• Building from source
  • Flatpak
  • Regular
    • Dependencies
    • Building
    • Post-install
  • Packaging tips (other than flatpak)
• Server OS support
• Configuration
  • Configuration files
• Debug logging
• Testing
• License
  • Lightkeeper
  • Crate dependencies
  • Liboping

• Monitor status changes periodically and get alert notifications.
• Monitor certificate validity and expiration.
• Status summary in host table for quick status view.
• Charts for visualizing historical values (not yet complete!).
• Log viewer with regex search and hotkeys similar to less/vim.
• Text file editor for editing remote files (with built-in editor or using CLI over SSH).
• Follow console output for longer running commands such as container builds and package updates.

Writing the same commands over the years can get tiresome and feel slow, even if utilizing shell's command history.
Another pain point is monitoring. Configuring and maintaining a software stack for relatively simple monitoring needs (graphs, alerts) can get needlessly heavy. Specifically, in my case, I aim to replace CollectD, InfluxDB and Grafana.

Lightkeeper is an maintenance tool for power users to simplify everything. At the same time, deploying should be as simple as possible since the aim is to streamline. The plain old shell doesn't need additional daemons on the servers so Lightkeeper shouldn't either.

It is recommended to download the app from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.kalaksi.Lightkeeper
It's sandboxed and uses the minimum amount of permissions required.

The alternative is building from source.

# If you're missing the runtime and rust extension:
flatpak install --user runtime/org.kde.Sdk/x86_64/6.10
flatpak install --user org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.10
flatpak install --user io.qt.qtwebengine.BaseApp/x86_64/6.10
flatpak install --user runtime/org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable/x86_64/25.08

# Test building: 
flatpak-builder build --user --force-clean flatpak/io.github.kalaksi.Lightkeeper-local.yml

# If you want to install also:
flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build flatpak/io.github.kalaksi.Lightkeeper-local.yml

• Qt 6.10
• liboping
• libdbus

you'll need these packages on Ubuntu 24.04:

• libssl-dev
• libdbus-1-3, libdbus-1-dev
• liboping0, liboping-dev
• libqt6svg6
• qt6-declarative-dev
• qt6-qt5compat-devel
• qml6-module-qt-labs-qmlmodels
• qml6-module-qt5compat-graphicaleffects
• qml6-module-qtqml-workerscript
• qml6-module-qtquick-controls
• qml6-module-qtquick-layouts
• qml6-module-qtquick-nativestyle
• qml6-module-qtquick-shapes
• qml6-module-qtquick-templates
• qml6-module-qtquick-window
• qml6-module-qtquick-dialogs
• qml6-module-qt-labs-platform
• qml6-module-qtcharts
• qml-module-org-kde-syntaxhighlighting
• qml6-module-qtwebengine

At least on RPM-based distro's, you'll need perl-Time-Piece for building OpenSSL.

QtWebEngine is not strictly required, but needed for proper integrated text editor.

For development, run this in repo root:

./build.sh

For running:

./run.sh

If you're getting error about missing qmake, you'll have to point cargo to correct qmake with .cargo/config.toml:

[env]
QMAKE = "/usr/lib/qt6/bin/qmake"

Flatpak manifest flatpak/io.github.kalaksi.Lightkeeper.yml can be helpful for understanding needed build steps.
QML modules in third_party/ have to be made available in runtime so that Qt can find and include them appropriately.

(qml_frontend.rs also defines some additional import paths for finding them).

If you're using the ping monitor (not used by default), you need to give Lightkeeper binary more networking privileges:

$ setcap cap_net_raw+ep $MY_BINARY

The (current) goal is to support:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• RHEL
• CentOS
• NixOS
• Fedora
• Alpine
• Linux in general (basic functionality for most distributions)

NOTE: Some commands need higher privileges. Those commands assume sudo is available and requires no password input. You can disallow sudo in host settings and those commands will be skipped.

Configuration can be done using the graphical UI or by editing configuration files.

Example configuration files config.example.yml, hosts.example.yml and groups.example.yml can be found in the root of this repository.

When running without flatpak, the default configuration directory is usually ~/.config/lightkeeper. With flatpak, it's the usual app specific directory ~/.var/app/io.github.kalaksi.Lightkeeper/config. You can use a custom configuration directory with the -c/--config-dir option.

Log levels are controlled with environment variable RUST_LOG, so use RUST_LOG=debug.

Tests are still a work-in-progress, but you can run them with:

cargo test

Also, test-env-directory contains Vagrantfiles for virtual machines and also matching configurations for testing.
You can use --config-dir to load the test configuration for manual testing. For example, ./target/debug/lightkeeper --config-dir test if building from source.

Copyright © 2023 kalaksi@users.noreply.github.com.

This software is licensed under GNU General Public License 3.
Dual-licensing is possible if your organization needs something else than GPL. Get in contact.

All crate dependencies contain permissive licenses (mostly MIT license).
You can check the licenses with:

cargo tree --format "{p} {l}" --prefix none

Or, to quickly see what different licenses are being used by printing only unique license strings:

cargo tree --format "{l}" --prefix none | sort | uniq

Liboping 1.10 (https://noping.cc/) is redistributed inside the flatpak package. It's a separate C library dependency needed by oping-crate and is distributed under LGPL-2.1 license.