aptunnel: Managing Aptible Tunnels the Way They Should Be Managed

If you work with Aptible, you know the drill. Every time you need to inspect a database, run a backup, or check a log, you reach for the Aptible CLI and type out the full environment name, the full database handle — manually, every single time.

The Problem Aptible Didn’t Solve (Intentionally)

Aptible’s tunnel model is a foreground blocking process by design. Open a tunnel, it blocks your terminal. Close the terminal, the tunnel dies. Need three tunnels? Three terminals. Which tunnels are open? No idea unless you tab through each one. This is actually intentional — Aptible’s security model assumes friction is protective. But that friction also makes daily development exhausting.

What aptunnel Does

• aptunnel dev-db — open a specific tunnel with a short alias
• aptunnel all — open every tunnel in an environment at once
• aptunnel status — see exactly what’s running, with uptime and URLs
• aptunnel dev-db --close — close a tunnel cleanly

Shell completions are dynamic — your actual database aliases appear in tab-completion. aptunnel is also a complete Aptible passthrough: any command you can run with aptible, you can run with aptunnel — with alias resolution built in.

Open Source & Aptible-Native

aptunnel is fully open source (MIT), available on npm, and accepts community contributions. It’s built specifically for Aptible’s architecture. Install with: npm install -g aptunnel

What’s Coming: aptunnel 2.0

The next major release will merge aptunnel and aptunnel-gui into a single unified tool — a terminal application that accepts both keyboard commands and mouse clicks. We’re actively building this, and contributions from the community are very welcome. Visit github.com/Uruba-Software/aptunnel to get involved.