Seashells

Seashells is a service that lets you pipe output from command-line programs to the web in real-time:

$ python train.py | seashells
serving at https://seashells.io/v/{random url}

There’s even a netcat API, so there’s no need to install software to use the service:

$ echo 'Hello, Seashells!' | nc seashells.io 1337
serving at https://seashells.io/v/{random url}

Any data that’s sent to Seashells is viewable in a web-based terminal, with data streamed to the browser in real-time using websockets:

It’s a super simple service that requires zero setup to use.

Seashells was created because I wanted an easy way to monitor long-running experiments: I regularly train neural nets and run related experiments, and I like to semi-obsessively track the progress of my code. From my computer, I can connect to the VPN, log in to the GPU box over SSH, and look at the output of a program running in a screen session. But I can’t do this from my phone or from another computer. All I wanted was to see a small amount of information like epoch 13/100, train loss=0.3825, test loss=0.4830 at a glance.

I didn’t find existing tools that satisfied my needs, so I built Seashells as a low-overhead way of monitoring programs that print progress to the console.

Seashells been serving my needs pretty well so far, and I hope others will find it useful too!